Housing is a complex issue. It’s hard enough doing one-off houses, and navigating irascible clients, budgets and so forth, but a great deal more complicated when one discusses the critical role housing has in the accounting of the country’s wealth and welfare. Is there any doubt that housing, in all its manifestations, lies at the heart of our success or failure as a country? It does not take long for any discussion about the state of the nation’s well-being to turn to examining the correlation between housing and health, or housing and social equity or any number of other social measures.

Very many research papers show that poor-quality housing and housing poorly matched to occupant need have negative impacts arising from issues of health, well-being and financial security. From such impacts, there is a slew of social consequences. The health impacts of poor housing, for example, are summarised in the introduction to Toi Te Ora, the Public Health website, which states:

“Unhealthy homes can impact on health in many ways. Houses in poor repair increase the risk of injury. Cold, damp, and mouldy homes are associated with illnesses such as asthma and respiratory infections. Cold indoor temperatures also increase the risk of acute cardiovascular events. When hazardous substances are present in a home the health of its inhabitants can be affected in both the short and long term. Household crowding increases the risk of infectious disease transmission. Crowded, cold, damp, and unaffordable housing can affect mental health. Conversely, having secure housing tenure and housing that enables connection with the local community promotes and supports mental wellbeing.”

None of this is likely to be news to any of you but an introduction to a glossary of research under the leadership of Associate Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman of He Kāinga Oranga, the Healthy Housing Research Programme, widens the area of concern beyond the individual housing unit and is more pointed in relating health outcomes to both housing and the wider community:

“Aspects of neighbourhoods that have been identified as having an impact on health are: the presence or absence of local amenities, such as parks and sports facilities; ‘incivilities’ such as the presence of graffiti, boarded-up houses, garbage accumulation, abandoned cars and broken windows, and the signalling effect of these physical features that no one cares; the perception of neighbourhoods as ‘safe’ and under effective informal social controls and the number of local organisations.”

The creation of ‘safe’ neighbourhoods and those making a positive contribution to public health is a much more complex business than is ensuring housing standards are met. Where the discrete house or apartment can be codified and will fall within the aegis of, at most, two or three public agencies, neighbourhoods and their public open space traverse property boundaries and are at the mercy of their public and private landowner aspirations.

Where land is aggregated in either public or private ownership, the opportunities for making safe neighbourhoods are greatly increased, though the ability to achieve successful outcomes rests on reconciling the expectations of very many interested parties. These include territorial authorities, government ministries, transport agencies, quangos and a raft of private interest groups, such as funding providers and insurers. The miasma created by this ad hoc assemblage of good and bad intentions, coupled with long-range planning, suggests that something more profound than tinkering with yards and setbacks is required.

A recent ‘Christmas bill’ proposed changes to the RMA in order to achieve greater development density and faster realisation of development by increasing allowable height, reducing yard and setback requirements, and allowing more buildings on a site as of right. That legislation, sped into law amid the Christmas rush last year, precipitated a flurry of activity among groups concerned with the protection and promotion of the public realm. Though all of us in our group shared hopes of more profound changes in housing and that the issues raised by Howden-Chapman would be addressed, we found ourselves slugging away over a metre here and a metre there as we examined the implications of the proposed heights, yards and daylight controls. We were, in cruel irony, trying to preserve the development standards embedded in the Auckland Unitary Plan, itself the result of an enormous effort by voluntary interest groups.

The proposed amendment was a numbers game, though: a sort of ‘full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes’ approach to development. Not quite echoing former finance minister Bill English’s comment that we might have to have ugly housing for a while, the ‘Christmas bill’ was, in Auckland Council planner John Duguid’s words, “really about bulk and location, not architecture and design”. Though probably intended as a quick sound bite, the implication that architecture and design are somehow unrelated to the process of determining bulk and location betrays a misunderstanding of what design is and its potential to meet complex social goals.

The quality of housing is important and its incremental improvement will remain so but the quality of public space, and those aspects of neighbourhood building that address personal and public health and well-being, require a concerted promotion of urban design and its role in the creation of safe and healthy communities. As we seek to navigate the implications of pandemic life and climate change, this is not the time to be distracted by the fight for another metre or so of outdoor living court, vital though that is for the occupants of those buildings. Rather than tinkering with a metre here or there, it is high time that we confronted the big issues of housing and set about creating safe, supportive, resilient and regenerative neighbourhoods.

It’s time to stop perpetuating the memory of the detached house, building with ever-smaller backyards: time to challenge the bureaucratic constraints on housing our fellow citizens with dignity and respect. We must set aside piecemeal, ad hoc responses driven by short-term political agenda and work across disciplines to achieve communities that meet, at least, Howden-Chapman’s criteria.

The mechanisms of community-building, and the physical and social infrastructure required to make healthy neighbourhoods are not unknown to those engaged in trying to tame the government’s tinkering. We know the deleterious effects of single-lot intensification, the centralising of the tax take and consequent starving of local infrastructure budgets, the manipulative power of foreign-owned banks, the implicit subsidising of private transport, zoning that requires a car to get a bottle of milk, the rash of cars on berms in the absence of onsite parking and public transport that would obviate the issue, and a host of other failures. We must challenge these, and the hegemony of property ownership, land development and infrastructure funding, the banking and mortgage industry, regulatory control and tenancy law.

These are not small targets and might be thought more likely the stuff of party politics but the relentless courting of the vacillating five per cent of unaligned electorate in the pursuit of the next parliamentary term invariably precludes such bold and risky agenda. We, the disciplines of architecture, urban design, planning and landscape will need to make the running, joining with those of engineering, health, economics and social sciences to show the way we might live. We owe it to our kids’ kids to roll up our sleeves and make a start.