Letters to the Editor: ugly homes and left-wing opinions

• Published date: 24 April 2024
• Publication title: Otago Daily Times: Web Edition Articles (New Zealand)

Are we building homes to be proud to live in

Good on you residents of Rawhiti St for objecting to the ugly Coronation Street development in your street – an area of extreme concern due to the water table level. These cheap and nasty looking blocks seem to be popping up in nearly every suburb.

The now completed block on the corner of Napier St and Kenmure Rd in Mornington is a total blot on the landscape. I haven't counted the number of units since completion, but it is close to the earlier plan of 17 on a corner site that once held three substantial family houses.

So much for these developments "overcoming the housing shortage", as Labour Party MP Ingrid Leary put it, when the owner of an even bigger block in Brunel St recently applied to use some of their units as bed and breakfast establishments?

Just who are all these mass units intended for then? Families? With no garden space for children to play, come on. Pensioners? Most of these units have stairs. The homeless we've read about more recently? Landlords, looking to rent them out for a small killing?

Some 80-odd years ago the then Labour government built houses for families who couldn't afford a home of their own. I was born in one of them and driving past it today I feel proud to the extent I could happily live there again.

Will the occupants of those built today feel the same?

Lois Galer

Dunedin

Truss this

In 2022, Liz Truss served as the UK's Conservative prime minister for 42 days, prompting the Economist to compare her shelf-life to that of an iceberg lettuce. A series of disastrous decisions had crashed the economy, her popularity sank to 9%, and she resigned. The lettuce won.

Christopher Luxon has been prime minister of New Zealand for over 100 days, but his equally disastrous decisions have crashed our economy. Results include a deepening recession, record emigration, the collapse of house-building companies, and business coming to a "screaming halt", in the words of BNZ senior economist Craig Ebert.

Recently a Talbot Mills Research poll reported that Mr Luxon's favourability rating was a staggeringly negative –7%, modified only slightly by the latest Taxpayer Union Curia poll, National's own polling company, to – 5%. Will Mr Luxon see the writing on the wall of the garden shed, and resign?

Jocelyn Harris

Dunedin

Safe as houses

It is a worry living in small iconic places in New Zealand these days. Here in Manapouri we are seeing the future arrive in the form of new subdivisions. Something...