David Cormack
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Vote for them, not for now
🕑 Added 2022-09-25 22:58:07 +0000 UTCIt's October 2011. Kim and I are house hunting. We had an upper ceiling of $450,000 to buy a house. We had a combined income of about $130k. Fortunately we had a friend who said that lifting our ceiling by $50K would get us a much nicer house and not materially increase our mortgage repayments at a monthly level.
We find a house in Ngaio that costs $480,000. Three bedrooms, 900 square metres of land (most of which is near vertical), needs nothing done to it. Now to be fair, this was a good deal back then. But now it's an unheard of steal. Now that house value has nearly tripled. Fast forward to today. Try finding me a couple in their late 20s earning a combined income of $390K so the equivalent story can play out.
I really like Ngaio. It's a lovely suburb. It's got reasonable public transport, a petrol station, pharmacy, vet, a really good butcher. Its even got its very own racist cafe owner who likes to display his bigotry on a blackboard.
It's one of those suburbs that people say is great for families. Except increasingly it's not. Because young families can't really afford to buy here. There are some flow-on effects to this. All the local primary schools are suffering low rolls. Without young families buying here there aren't new 5 year olds to repopulate. We're getting flyers in the letterbox advertising schools. Ten years ago and there were waiting lists.
So what's my point in all this? Well I'd dearly love future generations to experience living in the western suburbs. I'd love my area to be a bustling suburb, full of young families taking advantage of the newly renovated Cummings Park playground. For this to happen then there need to be some changes.
The march of progress should stop for nobody. Except there are some councillors who would dearly love to stop it. In the whitebread suburbs of Khandallah and Ngaio at least.
Diane Calvert is not a councillor with any eye on the future. She's got her eyes firmly fixed on what the boomer villa owning classes want. And by golly a lot of them don't want progress. They want to keep Ngaio and Khandallah as they are now. Impenetrably expensive. Locked. Gated.
In the Wellington long term plan, Diane managed to get the villa suburbs of Ngaio and Khandallah excused from intense densification. This densification is what will allow Ngaio and Khandallah to be affordable again, so that younger families can move in.
In fact if you look at voting records, Diane Calvert has pretty much voted against every single progressive thing you could imagine. She voted against a lot, including cycleways, the Pōneke Promise, funding for youth hubs/better youth engagement, increased arts funding and town centre upgrades for Berhampore and Island Bay.
At the other end of the spectrum is Rebecca Matthews. Rebecca has been the lone voice of progressivism in my ward. She is a renter so knows first-hand what it's like to not be able to own a house here in the area. She consistently votes in a way that doesn't benefit the currently-well-off, but for the next generation.
There are a swathe of progressive candidates running in my ward this year. Lachlan Patterson from the Greens is the next cab off the rank for me. But if we manage to sneak in two progressives then we've come a long way.
All of this is to say that voting in local body elections matters. Were it not for Diane Calvert and Andy Foster then Ngaio and Khandallah would also be seeing the same densification that much of the rest of the city will hopefully get. So get your papers out and vote for the candidates who want to leave something great behind. Not those who want to leave people behind.
This is true all over the country. Does Auckland really want Wayne Brown to continue fucking over the less well off? Does Wellington really want Paul Eagle to hamper progress when Tory Whanau is an option? Aaron Hawkins in Dunedin. There are progressive options. Find them, support them, vote for them, and encourage others to do the same.
Because I'm sick of being embarrassed by councillors with my initials. I want better councillors so I can leave behind a better city.
