Angela Fang already saw this country’s housing problems a bit differently. And now, she’s gained a unique perspective on Auckland’s urban sprawl – from jumping out of a plane 13,000 feet (4000 metres) above the city.
It’s also given her the 19-year-old a new perspective on life, after her cord stuck and her parachute refused to open, above Parakai last month.
“I started spinning, and obviously lost control,” she says. “I wasn’t that panicky, because I knew I had a reserve. But because I was spinning around, it was really hard for me to locate that, it was dizzy as hell. So I released that at about 2000 feet, but there were a lot of line twists, which locked my head in, so I needed to kick and turn around to release those cords.”
“Finally I was maybe five metres away from the power lines, when I managed to just turn. And I landed, and obviously gave everyone a super big scare – including my dad. I told him, ‘hey, Dad, I almost died’. You could just see the colour had drained from his face.
“Everyone else was in shock. So, I thought, okay, I might need to be the person who’s calm.”
Angela has today been named the winner of the Rod Oram Memorial Essay Prize for 2026, for her essay, Building houses that we can call homes. It’s published today at Newsroom.co.nz. The prize remembers Newsroom journalist Rod Oram, and his joy in sharing his enthusiasm and ideas with younger generations.
Rod had dedicated much of his personal and professional life to seeking solutions to how we and our communities can live in better accord with our climate and environment. He and wife Lynn brought their own approach to housing: they were early adopters (or experimenters!) with solar panels, battery-driven cars and more. And of course, Rod famously cycled almost everywhere – including from Kazakhstan to Istanbul, less than a year before his death in 2024.
His daughter Celeste Oram judged the inaugural Rod Oram Memorial Essay Prize, alongside three of her father’s friends and colleagues: journalists Vincent Heeringa, Anna Fifield and Jonathan Milne. It was an award in which younger New Zealanders, aged under 25, addressed the question: What must we do – and do now – to ensure that future generations live well in Aotearoa New Zealand?
In this, the award’s second year, Angela won from a wonderfully strong field. The judges also commended three other solutions-driven essays: Jessaien Govender’s argument for embedding kaitiakitanga in natural disaster adaptation decision-making, Adnan Ali Haqiqzai’s call to make disability inclusion non-negotiable, and Jack Anderson’s vision for more simply connecting New Zealand.
But Angela’s winning essay on a new economic treatment of housing stood out, for its beautiful presentation of a well-evidenced argument.
“I am 19. I watch my friends leave for Australia, where wages are higher and housing is cheaper,” she writes. “I watch others stay, determined to make this city work, even as it makes them work harder than they should have to.
“The wetland I helped fence near Ohakune years ago is now healthy. It was just outside of my friend’s farm. Bitterns have returned. The local school uses it as an outdoor classroom. It produces no export revenue, contributes nothing to GDP, and will never appear in a productivity report. But it represents a form of wealth that my grandchildren will inherit, if we make different choices.
“Housing is no different. A stable, warm, affordable home produces no export revenue. It contributes to GDP only in the most indirect way. But it is the foundation on which every other form of wealth depends. Without it, you cannot study, you cannot work reliably, you cannot raise children, you cannot participate in your community. You cannot live well.”
Angela is now studying law and environmental science with geographic information systems, at the University of Auckland. But her brush with death has given her a new appreciation for life.
It’s made her more aware of the importance and urgency of connecting people, so she wants to do more writing.
As well, she is campaign leader for Te Puawaitanga Women’s Organisation, and is now spearheading a petition to significantly reform the law to better protect the survivors of domestic violence. She’s frustrated at talking to women she knows about their experiences of abuse, and the inability of police and the justice and welfare systems to protect them.
She’s not afraid to advocate dramatic legal solutions, like a public register of offenders, in the hope of perhaps compromising on a satisfactory middle ground. “There’s a saying that we have in Chinese: If you want to open the window, you need to tear off the roof.”
In an interview with Newsroom, Angela tells how the optimism imbued in Rod Oram’s book, Three Cities, resonated for her. In it, Rod spends time Beijing, London and Chicago – and concludes that if 10 billion people are going to live well on this planet in 2050, we have to fundamentally change the way we do things.
Angela grew up nearly half her life in Beijing. She remembers days when she and her classmates would be ordered to stay home from school, because air pollution levels were dangerously high.
“I left Beijing in 2016, the same year he published that book,” she says. “A lot of things were beginning to happen, like the vertical green city to combat air pollution.”
Rather than expanding outward, the city is building upwards using sustainable materials, integrating plant life directly onto high-rise facades, and creating contained, energy-efficient “vertical farms” to curb urban sprawl.
The vegetation absorbs thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide, Angela says. And – in large part because of its more directive economy – China has been able to shut down thousands of high-polluting factories.
Angela can see how China and New Zealand – with two very different models of government – are able to bring different strengths to combating environmental harm.
Without the need to consult the public, China can implement and does implement far-sighted and longterm economic and environmental solutions. New Zealand’s elected government and councils must engage far more closely with the public, to bring people along – but that does sometimes mean policy can be volatile, changing every three years.
“There’s no perfect way of running everything smoothly and making sure every problem gets solved. Every kind of government has its ups and downs. I guess what we want as a country is to try to push through our limitations, to be more direct in dealing with certain issues.”
At the heart of her award-winning essay is the challenge of housing intensification – and her frustration at the to-ing- and fro-ing of successive New Zealand governments and politicians. She cites the 2021 bipartisan agreement on medium-density residential standards, allowing three storey homes to be built without resource consent in our fastest-growing cities.
But that agreement, between Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government and Judith Collins’ National Opposition, was rescinded by Christopher Luxon when he became National Party leader.
Then Housing Minister Christopher Bishop agreed with Auckland Council that it would be free to decide where to intensify housing and where not to, so long as it maintained the previous capacity to ultimately build at least 2 million homes across the region. That too was rescinded, this year.
Angela says politicians are putting heritage ahead of healthy home – when it should be perfectly feasible to have both.
“That’s the intricate balance that we need to talk about, right? Right now, we’re not building enough density. There are areas that are not heritage, that could be better utilised.”
In her essay, she tells of a friend who’s paying $400 a week for a one-bedroom apartment. “It’s outrageous,” she says.
“It gets to a point where politicians are too scared to make any changes, so everything and everyone just stays the same. That’s not what we want as a progressive country. We want to be able to adapt to the challenges facing us. And from my perspective, I believe that when there are more housing units, it’s going to get more affordable.”
Does she have hope that her generation can change things? “100 percent. If I have hope in myself, then I also have hope for my generation.”
