Tamaki Regeneration Company (TRC) is making great strides in regenerating the Auckland suburbs of Glen Innes, Point England and Panmure. Owned by Auckland Council and the Government, TRC has recently taken sole charge of managing all the 2500 social homes in Tamaki.
Over the next 10-15 years, regeneration will provide 7500 new quality homes and unlock opportunity for social and economic growth.
OurAuckland spoke to John Holyoake, TRC’s Chief Executive.
We hear about regeneration in Tamaki a lot, but what is it?
It’s about providing better outcomes for people in Tamaki.
That means working with council and agencies to get better connected streets and public amenities. We are very interested in social wellbeing, which means providing access to opportunities that could improve the lives of families as we move through getting better quality housing on the ground.
And there are economic benefits from regenerating the area. We estimate that there will be around 2-2,500 people on the ground working on the physical redevelopment of Tamaki. The opportunities that presents to Aucklanders and especially for people who live in the area in training and employment is really positive.
Ten years down the track, what will it look like?
We talk about Tamaki being an awesome place to live, and somewhere that people want to live, play, come to work and raise their family. That’s what we are aiming for.
Practically it means warm dry houses, services that are relevant to the existing and future community, upgrading of town centres and making sure amenities are appropriate to the population.
For me, that means people feeling safe, working locally or finding it easy to get on the train, or cycling, to get to work.
So it’s more holistic, not just building houses?
Yes, it is a holistic approach. Just building houses alone would get some good results, but it would be a missed opportunity if we just did that. With our partners we are doing simple, practical things to benefit the area. For example, we demand that everyone that we employ, contract, or pay a dollar to contributes something back to Tamaki.
That could be a consultant or a legal professional doing some pro-bono work for someone in our community to help set up a housing trust, right through to us working with our development partners and demanding that they employ a set number of people locally.
We ask them what they will do in terms of training, how they are going to do it and what skills and development opportunities they are going to bring to the area.
We are going to be able to guarantee a business opportunity over a 10-15 year period, and people can take that to the bank. They can invest or know that they can invest in, say, 10 apprenticeships for kids from the local high school and know that they will still have work once those people are qualified.
We have already seen local trade academy students into apprenticeships and scholarships, and received sponsored building work from partners who worked on the new early childhood centre and a refurbished community hall in the Fenchurch neighbourhood in Glen Innes.
How do you see this making a difference to the housing crisis?
If you are asking are we going to fix the supply issue, the answer is no, but we are putting another 5000 houses into a market so we are definitely contributing to the solution.
Then there is obviously the affordability question. We are very committed to affordability and we need to work within the requirements of the planning regulations at a certain price point.
But we are also looking at how we transition people out of social housing and into affordable rentals, and even into home ownership .
With the sort of scale we are talking about we have the opportunity to attract international partners which could bring with it innovative building techniques and ways of delivering and bringing a product to market that perhaps we haven’t seen before.
We want to contribute to the solution - to Auckland’s housing challenges, with innovation and affordability, and to improving quality of life for people by creating opportunities.
