September 18, 2019
State housing a mixed blessing for Māori
Happy birthday to state housing.
On this day in 1937 Labour prime minister Michael Joseph Savage opened the first state house on Wellington's Mirimar peninsula.
Bill McKay, the author of a history of of state housing, says those first houses were to address a housing shortage for working class families, rather than being thought of a social housing or welfare.
Māori weren't eligible until after the war, when state housing became a way to deal with the migration to the cities and a tool for assimilation.
"In my research I've seen the documents that say 'we're going to teach Māori to give up Māori ways, give up Māori customs and learn to live as Pākehā.' So state houses, even though a lot of people have fond memories of growing up in them, for many people in New Zealand they were a tool to eradicate your customs," Mr McKay says.
It was not until the 1980s that state housing designers started to consider the cultural needs of Māori and Pacific families, and even now the expected intensification of housing raises questions about how Māori cultural practices such as tangi can be accommodated.
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