HOUSING IN NEW ZEALAND

Te Ao Hou, September 1959, Page 38

HOUSING IN NEW ZEALAND “There can be no doubt that the standard of housing in New Zealand is good—much better than it was thirty or forty years ago,” says Mr Scott. “The norm in New Zealand housing is the State house, and it undoubtedly influences the rest of the building done here.” “Fundamentally it's a well-built house, and the average person can't do better than to go to the State Advances Corporation, take one of their standard plans and go along with it. “At the same time, while the State house has solved a housing problem, it has created another, quite different one—that of making a uniform, characteristic New Zealand house, and where there are many of them, of making entire housing areas appear monotonous and uniform.” Mr Scott, in his many years of planning houses for other people, has only built one for a Maori. “I'm the wrong person to ask about Maori housing,” he admits. “In fact, I don't think that there is a right person to ask such questions of. It's assuming, after all, that all people of one race want to live in the same sort of house and that just isn't true. “If one can generalise, one could say that the Maori tends to live in one room more than the Pakeha—that a medium sized kitchen and living area with a number of little bedrooms around it doesn't always make sense to Maori living. “In general, the Maori may be best suited by a larger centre-of-living space—but I don't want to lay down a law about it—I'll leave that to the department.” Model of Maori Community Centre, designed for the Raukawa Tribal Executive Committee to be built in Palmerston North. Some of the walls of the model have been left off to show the internal arrangements. The committee has been collecting funds for over three years in order to proceed with the work; and a great deal of money was raised in a spectacular Queen Carnival right through the Raukawa tribal district last year.