Rotten shame: Exposing the alarming construction flaws in NZ’s apartment developments
After all this time, John Gray isn’t far from where he started. The office of Hobanz, the Home Owners and Buyers Association of New Zealand, is a space in a bustling, well-appointed co-working centre on Auckland’s Ponsonby Rd. It’s just metres from the corner of Vermont St, where, in 2004, Gray discovered that his new house, part of a back-section development where he chaired the body corporate, was a leaky home.
As nice as the new office space is, the return to Ponsonby has been a retrenchment for Hobanz, the advocacy organisation Gray formed with Roger Levie in 2007. Hobanz used to have its own office and more staff. It continues to provide advice and services to people who find themselves in bad buildings, but the dream of it being a mass-membership organisation modelled on the Automobile Association has receded. Gray, who never gave up his day job as an airline pilot, is 64 and so is Levie.
“Roger and I do ask, where do we go next, and we’re not making any traction,” he says. “This will be our last push.”
“This” is a second, three-part season of A Living Hell, the documentary that originally screened as a one-off in 2021, presented by Gray and Levie. It makes the case that the leaky homes problem that emerged in the 1990s has not only not gone away, it has morphed into something much worse. More than half of all apartment buildings constructed in New Zealand in recent years have serious problems, it contends, and that is ruining lives.
“It’s our way of communicating the problem to New Zealanders, because the government won’t and no one else will – and certainly the real estate industry won’t,” says Gray. “And it’s all head-in-the-sand stuff. It’s buyer beware and I think that’s particularly unfair.
“This behemoth of an organisation called MBIE [the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, which subsumed the Department of Building and Housing in 2012] is responsible, but it simply will not tackle the problem.
“It doesn’t even want to recognise it. It just beggars belief that we’ve given it sufficient evidence of the problems and yet it turns away, it just turns a blind eye.”
As the title suggests, A Living Hell doesn’t stint on the human impact. It opens with The Ridge apartment building not far from the Hobanz office. The St Marys Bay block is a 2004 office conversion which, since 2020, has been a ruined shell, frozen part-way into a remediation launched by a fractured, dysfunctional body corporate. The people who bought apartments there – including a couple with a new baby given two days to vacate before their home was stripped out – are stuck paying their mortgages. With remediation costs estimated at up to a million dollars per apartment, it’s effectively unfixable.
Most Aucklanders don’t know it exists. The problems identified in more-visible buildings in the city centre will probably come as a surprise to most of us, too.
“There’s a little drive we did right at the start, where we just drove around the top of Queen St looking at apartments,” says John Hagen, the producer and director of A Living Hell. “We showed about five or six – we saw 25. All in that area, all defective, and most of them without a plan of what to do.”