Business North March 2021

12 | Ambitious project comes to fruition T T Karen Phelps The development has a diverse mix of housing, designed to suit all levels of the community. Dryden Property DEVELOPMENT A collaboration of some of Auckland’s most respected and established devel- opers is coming to an end as it finishes a seminal project in Auckland. Creating Communities was established by Arcus Property Ltd, Hopper Developments, Southside Group and Dryden Property Ltd in 2013 as a response to a ground breaking urban renewal project in Northern Glen Innes, which would see 340 homes built on re-devel- oped sites owned by Housing New Zealand (now Kāinga Ora). The project was not without challenges: the homes were to be built on 156 properties in 57 very different locations between the Glen Innes train station and Wai O Taiki Bay Wa - terfront meaning hundreds of neighbouring properties to liaise with. The project also sparked considerable con- troversy seeing protests, occupation of sites and vandalism of showhomes. Executive director of Creating Communities, Murdoch Dryden, says there was initially a lot of misinformation circulating as to what the project would involve causing undue alarm. “Creating Communities focused on commu - nicating not just with the wider community but also met regularly with a steering group of community leaders and with protestors to ensure they understood exactly what was happening and why,” he says. Rather than shipping people out of their homes and ‘packing them into high-rise slums’ - as some opponents said at the time – he says the opposite was actually true. “The project saw 60-70 year old state houses replaced with brand new warm, dry, modern homes occupied by state housing tenants right alongside private buyers and their families. “It was about replacing poor quality older housing and making more efficient use of land to create more housing. The most extreme case, for example, was a 90sqm old state house on a 2000sqm site.” Born into in an ex-state house that his parents were re-developing, Murdoch was in a unique position to understand the complexi- ties of the project. The Dryden family had also had personal involvement in Glen Innes for many years with Murdoch’s grandfather being one of the original earthworks contractors when the sub- urb was developed in the 40s and 50s, then his father was involved as an investor and a developer in the area. Murdoch was a project manager and tenancy manager of many of his father’s sites. Murdoch chaired the local business association and, as a consequence, became a stakeholder in the early development of the Tamaki redevelopment proposals in the early 2000’s working between government and the local community to ensure the best outcomes for both. So he says integrating the new with the existing population in a way that is sensitive to culture and history was one of the underlying principles of Creating Communities. One of the ways this was achieved was by introducing a mixed and blind tenure model – building diversity into housing so that it suited all levels of the community, from social housing at one end of the scale, through to affordable housing, right up to people who were prepared to pay top dollar to live in an area, while ensuring the quality and look of each type of housing was comparable. Murdoch notes that although social and affordable housing will be built where the government decides, the real challenge to creating a diverse community is to sell homes to private buyers who have the financial capacity to choose where they want to invest their savings. The success of this was best shown in the Wai O Taiki Bay area of Glen Innes, where some of Creating Communities’ architecturally designed homes sold for up to $3m, more than three times what the highest property had sold for in the area previously. “The aim was to take the existing com- munity and make it stronger,” he says, “and one of the ways to do this was to have new families come into the community and make significant personal investments and with it the commitment to integrate and advocate on behalf of their new community.” Another way this was achieved was through intelligent design where architects went beyond designing homes to get the best sun and views but also considered passive surveillance. This meant that fencing in the project was lower and less obtrusive, and kitchens and living areas overlooked the streets. Murdoch says the result is that as people are cooking they are also providing a low key surveillance of their neighbourhood in a way that has been shown to dramatically reduce crime and increase neighbourly interaction. Organised events such as BBQ’s and street parties have also helped foster this sense of community. The redevelopment was a pilot for the 8,000 homes to be built in wider Tamaki for the next 20 years under the direction of the Tamaki Re- generation Company (TRC), with approximate - ly 2600 of the new homes social housing with the remaining 5000-plus being sold privately. At its outset the Creating Communities project was the biggest and most ambitious brown-field redevelopment ever undertaken in New Zealand. “The Northern Glen Inns Redevelopment was a pilot and we learned an enormous number of lessons as we delivered this mul- ti-award winning project. “It would be a shame not to apply those learnings as Kāinga Ora kicks off multiple similar projects in the next few years. “The Northern Glen Innes project had a number of unique challenges from an initially hostile community to difficult topography and buyer reticence but we have progressively overcome them all to pave the way for TRC to progress the successful redevelopment of the wider Tamaki area. “The project has been a massive success on almost every level and we’re very proud of the to have been associated with it.”