‘Footpaths to nowhere’: Growing pains in southwest Christchurch

Saturday, 27 July 2024

Halswell is Christchurch’s most populous and fastest-growing suburb. But ask any local and they’ll tell you the roads, schools, shops and buses aren’t keeping up. KEILLER MacDUFF reports.

A decade ago, Kate Cleverly saw a need. Halswell, the suburb where she lives, was growing faster than anyone predicted and quickly turning from a community into a chain of subdivided islands. There were too few shops, amenities, roads and buses and too many “foot and bike paths to nowhere”.

She and some others started a monthly market for neighbours to meet. It quickly grew and, a decade on, running the Halswell Hub is her fulltime job. More than 700 people come through each week and the hubs makes welcome bags for new residents, including a map to help navigate the maze of suburban streets.

But almost as soon as it’s drawn up, it’s out of date. New streets and subdivisions are constantly being added.

Once a village on the city’s outskirts, Halswell is Christchurch’s fastest growing suburb. It long ago joined up with Christchurch and is now expanding outwards, particularly since the earthquakes. It now regularly tops the citywide table for building consents by suburb. But with the boom comes a string of downsides: a lack of shops and cafés, a state highway bisecting the suburb, poor connectivity between some subdivisions, the clamour for a high school and woeful public transport. A quarter of Halwell residents live more than 2km from a bus stop.

Halswell is also now the most populous suburb in Christchurch: 17,500 residents. Double what it was in 1996. Over the same period, the city as a whole grew barely a quarter. Between 2016 and 2024, more than 2800 houses and units were consented in Halswell. The next highest suburb was Burwood, with a mere 1100.

Cleverly says Halswell is now “a suburb full of little suburbs” and social isolation is a growing concern. Many residents have high debt ‒ young families “working all hours to pay the bills”. This amplifies other issues caused by language barriers, difficulty accessing public transport and few means of connecting outside of sport.

Even with hundreds of residents coming through the hub each week for various clubs or as new arrivals, there was “an awful lot we’re not seeing”.

The Christchurch City Council foreshadowed this problem a decade ago: “Halswell residents risk being isolated, with a lack of social connectedness,” it noted in a report. “Factors include the absence of a public community space where people can gather; the lack of small local infrastructure … the enclave-style subdivisions that don’t connect with each other, and the large busy roads slicing through various residential areas”.

The area is crying out for a more coordinated approach, but planning reponsibility is spread between two councils (Christchurch and Selwyn district), Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency and others. “No one party is responsible for everything,” Halswell Residents Association secretary Adele Geradts says. “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of actual discussion and interconnection about where and when things are supposed to be.”

“We deserve footpaths, we deserve crossings, and we deserve public transport”.

Crossing the road can be ”a real struggle”, she says, with some cycleways that stop abruptly, not enough pedestrian crossings, and a hodgepodge of speed limits creating confusion.

The high school is another hot topic. Nearby Hillmorton High is “a good school”, Geradts says, but is 7km from parts of Halswell and filling up fast.Many teenagers have to go into the city or out to Selwyn for school, she says, doing nothing for Halswell’s sense of identity.

In 2019, the Ministry of Education warned there was “no expectation of new secondary schooling”. This week, it reinforced that stance.

“There is no need for an additional secondary school in [the] Halswell, southwest area of Christchurch. Growth has been factored into Hillmorton High School, which is reflected in its master planning number of 2000 students,” a spokesperson said.

Last year, the school roll was 1189.

Local councillor Andrei Moore has heard it all before. “I get the same questions all week, every week,” he says. “’When are we getting a high school? When are we getting another primary school? When are getting more shops? When is the Woolworths development going ahead? When are we getting a footpath?’”

The building boom outstripped what anyone predicted, Moore says, and 3000 more homes are to come. A pending review of bus routes was welcome, but years overdue. Despite some residents struggling to access public transport, it wasn’t uncommon for people to be left waiting at bus stops because there was no room on board, he says.

“The Halswell I grew up in you could walk down to the park. Thirty years later we’re building areas where kids can’t access their own school or playground.

“A lot of Halswell ratepayers are paying for infrastructure they simply do not have.”

As part of a last minute bid to quell proposed rate rises, ECan recently voted to decrease funding for more frequent Route 7 buses (Halswell to Queenspark). Increasing the service to every 10 minutes had been due to begin in the middle of this year. It will now start in 2025, saving $500,000. Any route increase still hinges on approval from the government, when the final National Land Transport Programme is announced later this year.

The city council largely rejects the notion Halswell suffers from a lack of planning. However, acting head of planning and consents Mark Stevenson acknowledges “not all of the planned infrastructure improvements have been completed”, nor has a planned commercial centre been developed.

However, infrastructure has “broadly” kept up, he says, with the councils and agencies working together on things such as the 2009 South-West Area Plan. That looked ahead 30 years to ensure water, parks, facilities, drainage, roads, public transport and cycleways were “adequately serviced”.

Moore bristles at this: “[I]totally reject our organisation’s definition of ‘adequately serviced’.”

“Halswell was ripped off and shafted out of sufficient Southern Motorway access when the Awatea/Dunbars interchange was scrapped,” he says.

On top of that, too many subdivisions were being built nowhere near bus routes and while there are cycleways to Halswell, “[There is] very little safely linking them”.

Stevenson responds that the missing footpaths will link up “in time”, as developers fulfil their obligation to bring subdivision frontages “to an urban standard”.

Moore isn’t convinced. The subdivisions will never join up unless the council steps in, he says.

Resident’s ‘bugbears’

Candy Gillies moved to Halswell three years ago. Even since then, she says, the area has changed “astronomically”.

She worries some development is on low-lying, swampy or flood-prone land susceptible to liquefaction in another earthquake.

Another bugbear is the lack of cafés, shops or competition for the one supermarket. Residential development should not be allowed to go ahead without commercial development, she says.

“Here we are with thousands more houses going in, one supermarket, a scungy pub - that’s about to be developed, thank God. I just don't understand why investing in amenities per house is not a requirement for developers.”

The Residents' Association has repeatedly lobbied the council to alter the distribution of developers’ contributions.

Allowing them to go into a city-wide pool was “almost like a Ponzi scheme”, treasurer David Hawke says.

Halswell needs a plan to fix all its problems, he says, and avoid southwest Christchurch turning into “a slum”.

“Overseas evidence shows pretty clearly areas built on the fringes have been deserted for more central locations where people don’t have transport and other costs.

“It’s a complex problem, and complex problems don’t have simple solutions, but we need to get on a trajectory to prevent problems and chip away at the existing ones.”