You would have no doubt heard of the recent decision by the Wellington City Council to remove the heritage designation from the Gordon Wilson Flats, along with some positive changes to housing and housing density.  Young ACT Wellington welcomes the decision by the Council as a fantastic step in the right direction, and no doubt Young ACT Wellington played our part in creating support for this change. We would like to especially thank everyone who signed our petition to develop the Gordon Wilson Flats!

Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association replied to our ask for comment, by reiterating that they “have campaigned for the last 4 years on the removal of the heritage listing on 320 the terrace and for the site to be used for affordable, fit for purpose student accommodation to address the housing crisis in Pōneke.”  In our campaign, we asked how much high-quality student accommodation could be built on the site.  Housing is a hot topic in Wellington, so we would like to remind everyone that there are even things notional enemies have in common.

Democracy, self-determination, property rights, and kaitiakitanga are values that Young ACT Wellington seeks to champion in our community, and we couldn’t turn a blind eye to the waste that was being generated by the Flats.  It is hard not to notice the building is a big, unoccupied, derelict eyesore sitting on prime real estate on The Terrace.  So we did some digging to get to the bottom of why this land is being wasted in a housing crisis and the answer is quite simply: it’s a broken heritage building.

Victoria University of Wellington purchased the building from Housing New Zealand after it was discovered that the concrete was decaying, and the building was no longer safe for occupation. They did the math and determined that the cost of repairing the building was too high, so they sold it.  This seems to be the same concrete design that the Environment Court determined to be a factor in determining its heritage status.  In theory, the purchase made sense for the university as the building borders the Kelburn campus and it will allow the university to expand in the future. 

Yet after the University acquired the building, they found that their self-determination and aspects of their property rights were forfeit. Despite owning the building and carrying the risk, they could not make use of their own property because of the heritage status. The heritage status meant that the University could not demolish the Flats and had restrictions on how they could go about repairing it – even though it was hardly financially viable to repair. 

So, why did this hideous and derelict building have heritage status?  It turns out that’s a harder question to answer than we thought.  In fact, it is such a big question we are writing another piece that looks into this issue in depth.

Essentially the answer is that the Council removed its heritage status, but they were sued by a vocal minority group who managed to argue that the unsafe eyesore is worthy of maintaining significant heritage status. The court was convinced.

Imagine someone stopping you from replacing your broken laptop because it’s the only model of that laptop.  You can’t fix your laptop because it’s too costly to repair, and you can’t sell it either because no one wants a broken laptop.  Congratulations you no longer have a laptop because someone else with no interest in using the laptop, and won’t put up the money for fixing the laptop, spent money to take you to court to stop you from replacing your laptop.  That is essentially what was happening to the Flats.

This whole fiasco led to a rare event in that nearly everyone involved agreed on an action.  The University wanted it delisted, the Council wanted it delisted, VUWSA wanted it delisted, the local MP wanted it delisted… in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a soul in Wellington that didn’t want to see the building demolished.  Even the Council, being elected and therefore having a democratic mandate to make the decisions it does, found their could not remove the heritage listing until now.

Long overdue, some have attributed the confidence with which the Council voted for a second time to remove heritage protection, to the National Policy Statement on Urban Development and a loophole in the law which means that the Council does not need to worry about another appeal to the Courts.

The key takeaway from this whole story, is that after a point the benefits for having heritage protection rapidly decrease.  It can get to the point where the heritage protections defeat the purpose of having heritage protection in the first place. As said by Bill McKay, a senior lecturer at University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning, “You can’t demolish [them] but this often leads to demolition by neglect,”.  In this case, less regulation was better.

It is important for our heritage and our communities that in future, protections are fit for purpose and do not work counter to what they purport to do.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact media@youngact.org.nz.