Question

Real consequence ONE: cultural Social or Political) about Ihumatao

Answer 1

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Its isprime real estate – a 33ha block at the end of the Ihumātao Peninsula on the eastern fringes of the Manukau Harbour. It is rich with history – part of Auckland’s oldest settlement dating back about 800 years and bordering the Ōtuataua Stonefields Historic Reserve.

Answer 2

Dawn on May 20, 2016, at Ihumatao Village, Mangere. It’s Auckland’s oldest settlement, alongside a coastal estuary, just north-west of the airport. A Maori village, population around 120. A woman is walking back to the village from her job of unlocking the public toilets at Oruarangi Reserve. The woman lives alone here with the ashes of her husband, dead eight years, but she never feels afraid. You can hear te reo spoken on the streets, there’s a Black Power shed down the road and there’s a code: the village sorts its own stuff – you don’t ring the police, you don’t involve the law.

Except that today the law has come to Ihumatao anyway. It has landed soundlessly upon the fields beside the village, a planning judgment that gives Fletcher Living the right to begin the first 120 homes of its proposed 480-house subdivision on the 33ha Oruarangi Block alongside the Otuataua Stonefields Historic Reserve.

It was first mooted as a Special Housing Area (SHA) in November 2013, a confidential proposal, and the block only gradually emerged as the most controversial of the SHAs. Under the emergency conditions of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Act 2013 (HASHAA) – intended to deliver short sharp boosts to Auckland’s housing stock – the Oruarangi SHA is real, and the city’s oldest settlement will be joined, more or less at the hip, to Auckland’s newest housing estate.