The cracks are showing in Wellington’s efforts to get any infrastructure projects off the ground, stymied by cost blowouts and compounded by expensive reviews into why they shouldn’t proceed.
Last week, Mayor Andrew Little nixed the Golden Mile plan to spruce up Courtney Place and environs. But that was just the latest in a long list of things that are not happening.
“There’s an extraordinary and long-term problem in Wellington, which essentially boils down to: it’s really hard to build anything,” says The Spinoff senior writer Joel MacManus, who’s been closely following developments over the past seven years.
“Not just housing, not just private developments, but these bigger government projects.
“The Golden Mile being one, but [we’re] talking so much more … the second Mount Victoria tunnel, the Basin flyover – there’s just such a long track record of major projects in Wellington just falling over and not happening.”
MacManus says the capital is stacked with clued-up professionals who know how to put a halt to things.
“You generally have a lot of people who are very opinionated, very smart, and very familiar with the game of politics, and government, and working the system.
“And that does mean that when controversial things are proposed, or projects that will upset some subset of the community, they really have all the skills and capability to stop that from happening if enough people are sufficiently motivated.”
There are many times when such skills are celebrated, but MacManus says what’s started to happen in Wellington is that “when you oppose everything, you get nothing”.
Today on The Detail he talks about the unique factors in Wellington that contribute to its “interesting and difficult malaise”, including one not talked about enough – earthquake damage.
He says the Seddon and Kaikoura earthquakes in 2013 and 2016 respectively caused an extraordinary amount of damage in Wellington, “but it’s the little cracks” rather than obvious damage.
“It’s the damage to the foundations of apartments, it’s the little cracks in the pipes … and so you never quite saw the level of full-scale disaster that you saw in Christchurch for example, or that we’ve seen in other regions that have had major flooding or other natural disasters.
“That’s why the library had to close, that’s why the Town Hall had to close, and that’s part of why we have so many water leaks around the city – it all stems to this earthquake.
“But Wellington never got the government intervention, the mass outpouring of support, the money that it takes to rebuild. So a lot more of that has gone on the council and the homeowners. It’s just a kind of weird unfortunate situation where the earthquake was just kind of stuck in this bit of like, causing damage, but not quite enough damage to get the full insurance effects.
“It just feels like something the city’s struggled with for so long and no one really gives it enough credit for being the cause of so many of these issues.”
He points out that plenty of cities have grown and thrived in earthquake zones – Tokyo for example.
“It’s not impossible to do. But it does create that additional challenge of, you’ve got to build the base isolators, you’ve got to do the extra costs in the building and then insurance can be higher. It is an ongoing problem and it’s simply the ground beneath the city. It’s not exactly like it can be solved with politics.”
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