80% of the center city was written off.
I had 12 buildings in the center city.
I had not one left.
Suddenly from being a property owner,
I'm a property developer.
(orchestral music and people chattering)
It's now just over 10 years
since the Canterbury earthquakes.
CERA has come and gone,
there's a new Mayor in town
and a different political party in Wellington.
In this episode, we talk to some of the key people
involved in the rebuild of Christchurch,
particularly at center and find out how they feel
about progress.
Well actually Christchurch is fantastic
because it's a rebirth, so it's exciting.
It's actually going forward in leaps and bounds.
Because the central city was closed for such a long time
after the earthquakes, there's been concern
about whether its rejuvenation would work
and whether people would come back in from the suburbs.
If you have a city without a heart,
it doesn't have a soul.
So you've got to get the core of it right.
And if the heart of the city is thriving,
then the outlying areas will, as a matter of consequence,
they will thrive as well.
But it doesn't work the other way around.
So, if you want to go away to Sydney for a weekend,
no one jumps on the internet or Trivago or wotif,
and says Sydney suburbs.
They say, I want to stay in Sydney central city.
Now that's not to say that the suburbs
in Sydney aren't great,
they are, they've got Paddington, Surry Hills,
and chances are, those same people that have booked
their weekend away, will visit those areas.
They'll visit the markets in Paddington.
They'll go to the suburbs around Surry Hills
and enjoy themselves.
But it's got to be the heart that draws them in.
So I think the same should be accepted
and deeply embedded in our consciousness
in Christchurch, that if we don't get the heart right,
the rest is a waste of time.
So it will benefit the New Brightons, the Akaroas,
the Riccartons, the Hornbys,
if the heart is strong.
But Christchurch isn't going to thrive
just because it has a strong mall out in Hornby.
The city center is certainly taking shape
and people seem to be returning to use the new buildings.
However, there's still a lot of vacant land
throughout the CBD.
So in some examples, there are still insurance issues,
which I think people outside of Christchurch
might not have an appreciation for.
They say, well, you had a replacement policy
and why don't you just get on with it?
They're been greedy.
That's not the case.
There are a lot of people that have gone through the ringer
with the insurers, and there's no end in sight for them,
and that's terribly sad.
There are other people, and I think this is sad
for the community and for the city
that have had an insurance payout,
they've turned it into, in some cases,
a carpark and they're getting some income from it
in the short term,
or they've done nothing with it because it doesn't owe
them anything and they're just fine
now that they've had a tidy payout,
and they're sitting back and saying, do you know what?
Well, let's just wait and see.
Now I think that's really cancerous
to our progress as a city.
And I think that the acid should be tipped on them
to hurry up and either develop that site
or sell it to someone that will,
because there's no shortage of people
that do want to back the city,
and that's really encouraging.
But the people that are hanging on to these derelict sites
is not helpful.
When you talk about local developers in Christchurch
or people that have done development and redevelopment,
and the rebuild of the city, very often, pre-2010, 2011,
they were less developers, more investors.
So they tended to be asset owners who had significant assets
in the city in terms of built form
and by dint of what happened,
they had to either sell up and move out
or they had to actually redevelop their assets.
And so they became developers, if you like.
So yeah, we hold them pretty dear to our hearts
because they had the choice, stay in Christchurch
or go elsewhere, and they chose to stay.
When CERA set up Christchurch and said,
we need to bring outside investment in
and everything else,
and they thought the Chinese were going to come
rushing down and do lots of development,
didn't happen.
It's the local passionate, slightly nutty people like me
that have actually brought Christchurch together
and you've got to be totally passionate to do it,
because actually it doesn't make money at the moment.
Some of that outside investment was meant to come
from Wellington, for blueprint or anchor projects.
The theory was that the crown would make a significant
number of investments and that would be the catalyst
for the private sector to be fast followers.
The reality of Christchurch was that the private sector
moved before, faster than the government.
And as we sit here today, there are still,
of those blueprint projects,
there's still one that hasn't even started construction.
So the short answer is the private sector moved much faster.
There've been a number of projects
which have been presented as part of the blueprint.
And that was kind of,
that was local government and central governments
end of the bargain,
and they'll do that, and the private sector
is expected to do their part.
Now the private sector has done their part,
so I think with these anchor projects that have been pushed
out longer and longer, it's really a slap in the face
to the people that have put their hard earned capital
into Christchurch.
I always wondered why they called
them the anchor projects.
I now know why, it's stuck in the ground going nowhere.
And thank God they're starting to come out
of the ground, but it's been far too long.
They should have been the lead pins.
I'm pretty impatient at the best of times,
so it's certainly not happening fast enough.
And I would place blame actually at our own council
and at the crown to a certain extent.
People are understandably very frustrated when
we still haven't got the likes of the Metro Sports building,
the convention center, or the closed drift stadium.
So it's really important, in my view,
that crown and council pull a finger out
and start delivering these things,
because that was the package that was presented.
It's definitely accepted by everyone involved
that the crown projects have taken far longer
to start or finish than anticipated, but finding out
why is difficult.
There's probably no time in an interview to talk
about the level of frustration that I might feel
about these matters, but I've learnt that expression,
that I focus on the things that I can change
rather than the things that,
it's just water under the bridge, I'm afraid.
I mean, one of the reasons is that in this country,
we have a process on public sector projects
around business cases.
Part of that business case is the constant search
for value for the taxpayer, which is fair enough.
You're spending someone else's money.
You should be realistic about it,
but that constant search for value
often means that you go around in circles
on your business case,
and that extends the time it takes to make decisions.
And so I think the other thing in Christchurch
was that we were looking at public sector projects
and applying a business as usual lens to the procurement
and the way that they were dealt with when in fact,
the landscape was not business as usual.
The whole plan is really being put into place.
So we are watching, albeit, much slower in my mind
than it should have been in a number of key areas,
but we're seeing them put into place all of the things
that we created
so there's been really very little change
in terms of what the ultimate outcome will be,
but definitely a change in timing.
And I think that's holding us back a little bit, personally.
(orchestral music)
This program was made possible
by the RNZ NZ On Air Innovation Fund.
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