When everyone lived in an affordable home

In 1842, just two years after the signing of te Tiriti o Waitangi, Governor WIlliam Hobson passed New Zealand’s first building regulation – the Raupō Houses Ordinance.

It would have perhaps been better to call it the ‘anti-raupō houses ordinance’; it levied an annual tax of £20 on any existing building made of traditional materials in the main cities. Twenty pounds was a lot of money at a time when new settlers could get themselves a rough dwelling made from local materials for under £10.

It got worse: anyone building a new raupō home was hit with a £100 fine – an enormous punishment.

The ordinance was ostensibly a fire safety measure, says Deidre Brown,  Professor of Architecture at Waipapa Taumata Rau–University of Auckland and co-founder of MĀPIHI, the Centre for Māori and Pacific Housing Research.

There had been a few nasty fires in European raupō homes, partly because the settlers put their kitchens inside the main dwellings; in Māori wharepuni, cooking areas were separate.

But Brown is sceptical.

“There's been research suggesting the government was concerned Māori builders were undercutting the new settler builders because Māori could build out of raupō,” she says. The ordinance was more about protecting the newly arrived British carpenters.

It was also one step in a process of Pākehā imposing on Māori rules of what a ‘proper’ house was like.

“We weren’t allowed to be autonomous anymore in how we were building and designing,” says Māori architectural designer Savannah Brown, now working  on her PhD at MĀPIHI.

As iwi land was sold or stolen and wetlands drained, Savannah says, Māori lost not only places to build their whare, but also the forests and marshland where they got building materials. As younger people moved away from their kāinga, communities lost labour too.

Instead of homes being free to build and to live in, and homelessness being virtually unimaginable, Māori found themselves at the bottom of the housing heap, living in substandard accommodation in the cities. 

“Everyone knows that often Māori in the city just have to take what’s offered,” said a 1960s National Film Unit documentary. “You end up in a slum if you’re unlucky.”

Census data shows even in the 1930s, Māori homes were much more likely to be owner-occupied than homes overall, but numbers were falling.

Post-second world war state housing helped, plus an innovative scheme brought in by the Walter Nash government in 1959 where low-income parents, including Māori whānau, could capitalise their present and future child benefit payments and use them to buy a home.

 The scheme saw total home ownership rates in New Zealand rise to almost 75 percent in the 1991 census; but for people of Māori descent it was just 57 percent.

In retrospect, that was a high point. By the 2023 census, Māori home ownership was 27.5 percent. More than 60 percent of the homeless population identify as Māori, and Māori are more likely to live in cold or damp homes than Pākehā.

Assimilation by housing

Houses for Māori moving to the cities were different too, designed for the European ‘mum, dad and three kids’ nuclear family the government saw as the future of New Zealand, Deidre Brown says.

“ They just weren't built for the bigger Māori families; six, maybe eight kids and lots of aunties and uncles and cousins coming in and out all the time, bringing kai with them."

Tiny kitchens couldn’t accommodate all the women cooking together, and having bathrooms and laundries close to food preparation areas breached tikanga. Meanwhile, sticking houses at the front of sections left no space for mihi whakatau, pōwhiri, chatting with the many visitors, car parking, tents – even tangi.

And that hallway down the middle was not only a complete waste of space but created a barrier which prevented the singing and storytelling which went on in a traditional whare moe, Deidre Brown says.

European homes were built for privacy and separation; Māori homes were designed for connection. 

Māori-centric design

But things are changing, albeit slowly.

Iwi-led housing projects are incorporating Māori-centric design and building processes. At Te Mahurehure Marae in the Auckland suburb of Pt Chev, a 14-home Ngāpuhi development incorporates the papakāinga – medium-density social housing – into the marae community and the natural environment.

“It’s the best move I’ve ever made,” says Poto Stevens Dunn, who has lived at Te Kāinga Atawhai since it opened in 2023. “My place is a beautiful open space with the kitchen designed for one, but being Māori, you tend to have people calling in for kai and whatnot.

“Being next to natural bush, being next to calm, is absolutely amazing. It's a really healing, encompassing place to be.”

Further south, Ngāti Toa has a number of housing projects around Porirua.

“Because [the people living in the developments] are often related, they've done away with front yard, back yard, and they're very closely linked to their wharenui, their meeting house,” says Deidre Brown.

“They've got kura kaupapa there, Māori immersion education, and a community vegetable garden.”

The model is “just extraordinary” she says.

“They are creating their own supply chain. From their own land with their own forests, their own building suppliers, their own builders.

“In many ways, they have created a model of building that is like what their ancestors had in the nineteenth century, but through contemporary means. They are using modern building technologies, modern supply chains, but it's all tikanga based.”