Operation homeless

BY JANIE SMITH

An ambitious multi-million-dollar, world-first plan to transform the inner city and provide accommodation for the homeless is a step closer to reality.

After three years of planning the Mission in the City project, led by the Auckland City Mission, has just been granted resource consent.

Auckland city missioner Diane Robertson says the mission is contributing the land for the development and now that the project has consent, it will need to raise around $100 million for the construction.

Mission in the City chairman Richard Didsbury, who is known for projects like Vero and the Sylvia Park shopping complex, is volunteering his time to lead the development.

He says unlike the other big projects he has been involved with, there is no international precedent for building new facilities for society's most marginalised people.

There is a similar project in New York but it makes use of existing buildings, he says.

"Normally in big cities people want to ignore the marginalised, find an old building and put them out of sight and out of mind.

"The idea of giving them quality accommodation allows people to move from a period of feeling isolated and out of touch with society and their families so they can transition back into the mainstream and back into jobs and relationships."

Once built, the development will include 80 apartments providing homeless people with supported accommodation, a 20-bed drug and alcohol unit and 50 apartments for solo parents undertaking fulltime university study.

All the social services provided by the mission will be relocated to the new building and on the ground floor there will be retail shops and other services like doctors' surgeries.

Ms Robertson says the area along Hobson St is the most densely populated in the country but has very few amenities for those who live there.

"There is no public space to play or sit, no community facilities. The Mission in the City project is about developing an inner-city community. Tenants around here have Hobson St as open space."

She says Housing New Zealand is considering buying or leasing up to 50 of the apartments and the Auckland City Council will contribute towards the public space aspect by putting in a park between neighbouring St Matthew-in-the-City and the development.

The front of the current city mission building will be retained because it has heritage protection, but the rest of the buildings will be demolished.

The new apartments are designed to face the church rather than the road so tenants can exit into the park instead of the street. They have also been designed with sloping roofs to give them a modern cathedral look in keeping with the church.

The building will also have features like a library, gym and greenhouses so tenants can grow their own vegetables.

"Architecturally it's quite a stunning piece of work, it's very different from the boxes across the road."

The design, by Stevens Lawson Architects, was chosen from a competition pool of 48 entries.

Ms Robertson says the project will now go into the detailed design phase and while that progresses, teams of people will work on a model for how the development will operate.

- © Fairfax NZ News