Somewhere in North Canterbury, not long after the train turned inland up the Conway River valley, a young man leered drunkenly at us from his perch atop the chicken shed. Though still only late afternoon on New Year’s Eve, his ragged T-shirt and bare buttocks, and the antics of his similarly attired chums whirling about a large marquee erected within a lonely farmyard, suggested a lively night ahead. His teetering salute was a fitting finale to the enthusiastic waving and shouting that we had enjoyed as the recently realigned tracks carried us through the informal encampments of the Kaikōura Coast.  

It was easy to understand the source of such apparent good humour – a sublime, clear, calm day with the sun a searing white ball of salty air and strands of mountain mist, the gathering of whānau and friends for a party, and that delicious calm of having stopped; of having returned to a familiar fold in the hills, a gap in the rocks to launch the tinny and a short strip of sand for the kids.

This is the stuff burning in many architects’ breasts – a return to the shed, to simple living arrangements and a life freed from the escalating expectations of bourgeois residential clients. It doesn’t last, of course. The calendar continues to step ruthlessly through January and ubiquitous WiFi provides an unwelcome link to the office, winkling out all but the most-determined recluse. And so we pick up the cudgels again, returning to our labours, attracting work and keeping the studio doors open, and, if possible, if the stars of client expectation, site and budget align,  making architecture. The awards programmes suggest that we are doing pretty well at making beautiful and interesting one-off buildings, yet we do this within a society in which the provision of warm, dry housing for all its citizens seems an increasingly intractable problem. 

It is bizarre that a country awash with consumer goods, and all the other measures of GDP, should fail so in this most basic requirement of a civilised society. Though some would argue that architects are little more than manipulators of surplus – that others in the construction industry provide similar outputs for less money – I am certain that we architects produce richer outcomes. In short, we make better use of scarce resources. While this is certainly true of one-off projects – a house, a chapel or a civic building – we seem particularly toothless in the larger issue of addressing the supply of housing on a national scale. 

Were the matter to be resolved by the better manipulation of built elements, I have no doubt we would rise to the occasion and produce an outstanding solution. Alas, the supply of mass housing is a more complex issue. It is a mix of land and capital within a soup of demographic change and political machination, the whole potage made less amenable to change by the indecent hold economic liberalism has over the country.

So pervasive is the faith that the free, or lightly regulated, market will meet social imperatives that it feels like heresy to propose any other mechanism for the distribution of goods and services. Yet, there are some things too complicated for the market to resolve and surely the abject misery of those forced to live in cars is proof positive that perhaps the provision of housing requires a somewhat bolder strategy than tinkering with the market’s supply or demand. 

The cost of construction, be it of individual, medium or high-density housing, is just too high relative to the earning capacity of the greater numbers of our community for it to be considered as a consumer good. Housing should, instead, be considered part of our national infrastructure, in the same way that the other necessities of a civilised society are. Hydro dams, airports and hospitals are planned, constructed and financed according to their ability to achieve community goals, such as the distribution of goods and services, and health. In such projects, the public purse is employed to provide long-term capital funding and legislative leverage is applied to loosen up the process.

We have, of course, been down the path of a more-interventionist government involvement in housing, well before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher gave political clout to the liberal anti-Keynesian economic theory that had powered much of post-World War Two reconstruction. Along with a progressive social agenda, Aotearoa manipulated land, capital and private enterprise from the late 1930s to provide state housing. That was until the 1991 introduction of market rentals for state houses effectively disengaged the government from the direct provision of housing and heralded the rise of government meeting its political agenda through tinkering with market mechanisms.

Surely this is the abdication of one of the central reasons we gather into communities: the supply of goods and services to meet the basic human requirements of shelter, health and well-being. So, where do we, sitting with our mice and 6Bs, fit into this? The making of housing that is sublime, an efficient use of resources and long-lasting is not beyond our profession. We are, after all, able to do this consistently and beautifully for our individual clients.

Alas, no amount of one-off exemplars will effect the changes to the land and capital apparatus required if we have a mind to address the vast elephant in our industry that is the ‘national housing crisis.’ And why would we not? More than any others, we are the last generalists: able to work across disciplines, to reconcile the chaotic and seemingly disparate in the derivation of excellence. We may, though, need to set down our tools for a while and act a bit more politically.

The Institute of Architects has a raft of initiatives under way to address the conditions within which the profession works. These include directing its attention to the unintended consequences of poorly thought-out legislation or project managers’ pernicious manipulation of procurement procedures.

It would probably be an unwelcome challenge to its scarce resources to launch a programme aimed at reconfiguring the very basis of our national housing strategy; however, the Institute’s acquisition of in-house legal advice heralds a more focused engagement with the instruments of law and governance that constrain our working environment.

Perhaps it is not too big a step for the Institute to provide, at least, a catalyst for a vigorous, cross-disciplinary examination of the ‘housing crisis’: an examination freed from the cant of neo-liberal assumptions. If we do not step into the vacant ground of this issue, we may be damned to be as the North Canterbury rail-side party-goer: having a private party as the housing train hurtles past. 

This article first appeared in Architecture New Zealand magazine.

Subscribe here