Restoring old houses — just who benefits?

Press, 28 February 1981, Page 15

Restoring old houses — just who benefits?

By

JOHN WILSON

No-one is better aware than the New Zealand Historic Places Trust itself that its resources are inadequate to the task, it has been set: preserving as many as it can of New Zealand's historic sites, buildings and structures. A book appeared in New Zealand bookshops just before Christmas which reflects the trust’s realisation that, the best hope for preserving the representative as well as the best of New Zealand’s “colonial” architecture is to help those who are restoring or preserving old buildings at their own expense for their own use. .The book, ‘‘Restoring a New Zealand House,” has "been written by Christopher Cochran, an architect at the Ministry of Works and Development who is also chairman 'of the Wellington regional committee of the trust. It is a practical manual, written with those in mind who have bought an old house, perhaps in a fit of enthusiasm which soon wilts in the face of rotting piles, decayed weatherboard, rusted guttering and tottering chimneys. The book builds usefully on the New Zealand do-it-your-self tradition. It suggests tackling jobs which would, in other places, certainly be left to tradesmen or professionals. Harnessing this tradition to retain gracious and representative examples of ordinary domestic buildings of the past is certainly sound policy at a national level. The emphasis on people who have bought old houses for restoring doing the work themselves, is also sound on a personal financial level. Restoration work can be expensive. (I speak from experience. I bought a sound but sadly dilapidated old farmhouse myself for $20,000, and spent another $lO,OOO in the first year that I owned it, even allowing for much scraping, painting, plastering and other easier jobs being done by myself and my coowner.) The book also expounds a “philosophy” or “aesthetic” of restoration — that the aim should be to have the restored building looking as much as possible as it did when it was first built, even though interior and some exterior modifications are unavoidable if old houses are to meet today’s standards of convenience and comfort. But there are many ways, as the book points out, to keep these modifications to a minimum. This somewhat purist approach is surely justified. There are examples galore, all round New Zealand, of inappropriate additions or alterations to older buildings — the walling in of Verandahs, roof lines broken by often clumsy new attic rooms, stucco applied over weatherboards — which have destroyed the architectural quality of the buildings quite as completely as decaythrough neglect. There are, to go inside, useful sections on wallpaper patterns, and to go outside, sections on paint colours, to help those aiming for a authentic a restoration as possible. What the book does not address itself to is the social question raised by the application of what it advocates to older inner-city properties. ; The phenomenon is known J overseas as “gentrification.” ; As a “better class” (or more

accurately, a better-off class) of people'move into an area, buy up run-down old houses and do them up. property values rise sharply and the stock of cheaper flats is reduced, to the detriment of those who cannot afford to pay high rents or to buy their own houses. “Who are the cities being preserved for?” is the question being asked overseas in respect of such areas as Islington in London or the Marais in Paris. In New York the “brownstone revival” (so called from the material of which large numbers of old apartment buildings and town houses in that city are constructed) has provoked similar questioning.

New Zealand may lack the large numbers of urban poor to be found in cities overseas, but there are groups in New Zealand which need cheap rental accommodation — retired people on fixed incomes, social welfare beneficiaries, students and the like. Recent newspaper reports have suggested that in both Auckland and Christchurch, at least, cheaper rental accommodation, usually in somewhat run-down older houses, is becoming harder to find. To some extent professionals and the better-paid are moving back into inner city areas and buying up old houses for restoration, sometimes in the process reconverting into single-family homes larger houses which had been split up into flats in the past. This may not be the only, or even the major, cause of a decline in the number of cheaper flats available, but it is probably playing its part. The trend is well enough established for one firm, Seminars Pacifica, Ltd, to have offered one-day seminars in various parts of the country on bu.ying and restoring old houses and buildings for profit — the cost of the seminar alone being well beyond the means, of the less well-paid. If this were to be done on a large scale, the inevitable result would be a reduction in the numbers of cheaper flats available. Ari inner city housing boom in Auckland — based on the fact that older innercity houses have been re-

markably cheap to buy in recent years — has already prompted landlords in that city to sell up their properties for large capital gains. Property values in inner Christchurch are still relatively low, so that this inducement to landlords to sell their inner-city flats is not yet strong here. But the values of old houses in Christchurch are expected to rise, partly as more people realise what good propositions they are for restoration, for their own use or for letting at relatively high rents. At the very start of the trend towards preserving

rather than demolishing even humbler older buildings, efforts were made in the United States to mitigate the ill-effects of restoration of older houses on property values and rents by what was known as ‘homesteading,” after the practice of the United States Government in the nineteenth century of practically giving away farmland "to encourage settlement. Abandoned or derelict properties (which had sometimes been seized by local bodies for the non-payment of rates) were sold "for a nominal sum, as little as $l,

or given outright to poor families or occupiers on condition that they did the properties up for their own use. The new owners were also, in some cases, given loans at low rates of interest to get the work done. Started in 197.3, homesteading has not realised the highest hopes held of it, but it. has in a few cases helped restoration of older houses without "gentrification'’ displacing poor residents.

Since 1978, New Zealand has had modest sums directed into the rehabilitation of urban houses, to encourage local bodies, home owners and private developers to improve old.houses near the city centres rather than replace them. The economic and social impact of the way these sums have been used has not, to my knowledge, been studied, but it would be interesting to know what proportion of them has benefited owner-occupiers and what proportion those doing up older properties to let at higher rents.

But these social and economic issues are a long way from' the severely practical handbook which the Historic Places Trust has published out of an interest in seeing old houses restored as well and as authentically as possible for historical and architectural reasons.

In fact, the sorts of efforts which the book is likely to stimulate and encourage are those of younger people restoring old houses for their own use. and from motives which are closer to those of the Trust than of those who see in doing up old houses an avenue for making money from rents.