Self-help house in a community partnership

Press, 30 May 1985, Page 13

Self-help house in a community partnership

By

STAN DARLING

A three-bedroom house sitting on a small rise across the Manukau City Centre could be the start of a revolutionary new way of providing shelter for low-income families.

The handsome house is a showplace in a community beset by staggering social problems. Its designers have devised a system of manufacturing housing that could be produced by future owners. They are determined to go ahead with a factory now being built, even if Government seed capital does not appear.

Cr Alan Johnson, a member of the Manukau City Council, says the Manukau Neighbourhood Development Unit’s self-help project is worth a try, especially with more than 2000 families in South Auckland having an urgent need for a place to live.

The real need could be much greater, he adds. "The more houses you build, the more people come out of the woodwork with housing expectations." About 40 families have already shown an interest in building their own houses. Cr Johnson says a successful factory project could be a return to pioneering days, when the community pitched in to help build houses.

The house is "basically a wooden tent ” It would be erected in the ictory by extended families, then

taken apart to be reassembled on a site. About the last third of the work will be on the property, where four houses could be clustered on a section. The Manukau City Council develops and sells about 100 sections a year. Cr Johnson says that could be a source for future land which is all sold to the Housing Corporation now.

Unskilled persons would be able to go into the factory and put together a house under supervision. They would be working on the houses of others as well as their own.

"We believe we shouldn't become just an arm of the Housing Corporation," says Cr Johnson. "Families will rent the houses on a rent-to-buy basis." When they bought the house, it would be at the price needed to replace the structure. "We see co-operative aspects of the scheme as being essential. That is the community aspect. Co-opera-tion is better than competition, especially for the low-income people."

He wants to see Manukau Houses scattered among Housing Corporation mass housing, which can be “pretty monotonous.” Money for the scheme so far has

come from the Anglican Church and McKenzie Trust, as well as the City Council. A future owner's efforts, known as “sweat equity,” would help reduce the cost of his house.

In the factory now being built, families would manufacture component modules for the house. They would bolt the modules together on the construction site. To save money, factory construction workers will mix 80 cu m of concrete bv hand.

"What do they call it. Buddhist economics? Here you get more people than equipment, but you still achieve the same ends,” says Cr Johnson. Roof trusses were manhandled up without a crane. A couple of solo parents have come down to the factory site to lend a hand. A report on the Manukau House said that publicly owned housing was often supplied with little real reference to the consumer, and expected little or no effort or input from the user.

That would change with the Manukau House. The self-build project would encourage the eventual homeowners to become more responsible, both for family housing and provision of other needs.

Participating families would have the opportunity to act in other Neighbourhood Development Unit fields, such as food growing, clothes making, and family holidays.

With overheads kept to a minimum. it could be possible to build a family-sized, two-storey house for less than $25,000. Overall cost of the house, including property, could be about $42,000.

The Government has been asked for a short-term loan of $lOO,OOO to help build the scheme’s first four houses. That would be bridging finance until the project could sustain itself.

Some of the rent paid by families in the scheme would be saved towards a deposit to help those families gain mortgages. Henry Ford was the first to introduce mass production using unskilled or semi-skilled labour. Jobs in the factory would be broken down into simple tasks strung together to form a production line.

The Manukau House design would be so adaptable that its production could be broken down into simple jobs, such as cutting timber to length and drilling bolt holes in specific places. Minor design changes in the prototype house could lower the

cost even more, making the house stronger and easier to fabricate and erect. Cr Johnson says that a community housing fund, a “community bank" that dealt with housing, would be set up regardless of Government participation. Manukau City, in some ways, was still “a place without a focus." A housing project could help develop a sense of community. The Manukau House project can be seen as part of the City Council's policy of creating a “community sector” in the economy, using part of the “poverty industry” money spent on welfare and other services to establish communitybased activities. A climate of “social partnership" sought by that policy would start to grow as transferred funds helped the community meet its problems.