House carnage worse than official figures suggest

Hundreds of local homes remain unliveable due to flood damage despite official figures showing few red-stickered buildings.

Some landlords and home-owners have chosen not to call in council inspectors, with many preferring to make their own arrangements for assessments and repairs. The same applies to some retirement homes in the North Shore flood zone, where residents have been moved out of scores of apartments and villas.

While homes and units may be below the threshold to be yellow or red-stickered, their condition has meant people have been forced to move out for repairs or are essentially camping in compromised living situations.

Among damaged Auckland Council properties leased to sports clubs, a number have also not been visited by inspectors.

The Observer has been pushing for a comprehensive breakdown of council figures for damaged homes, but discovered statistics give a different impression than conditions in local suburbs. Some community leaders fear with attention centring on cyclone damage in Hawkes Bay and dramatic slips in west Auckland, the wider public is unaware of just how many people have been impacted in Milford, Sunnynook and surrounding suburbs.

They are now dealing with people desperate for accommodation, in dispute with landlords or living in fear of more rain in their own flood-damaged homes, carrying mortgages.

Auckland Council’s latest figures for the Devonport-Takapuna Local Board area show:

• Milford has six properties with red stickers, 132 with yellow stickers and 52 white stickers.

• Forrest Hill is next most flagged, with two red-stickers, 55 yellow and 44 white.

• Castor Bay no red, 12 yellow and 11 white.

• Takapuna has no red, seven yellow and eight white

• Sunnynook, has no red, 13 yellow and three white.

(A red sticker means it is unsafe to enter the property; a yellow sticker indicates restrictions on entry; and a white sticker allows entry though some flood damage has occurred).

In Sunnynook, where two people were swept to their deaths in the Wairau Creek on 27 January, as recently as last week people were being told on reinspection that their homes needed to be temporarily vacated.

“There are masses of houses that probably shouldn’t be lived in,” Sunnynook Community Centre coordinator Bronwyn Bound told the Observer. “If the landlord won’t do anything about the wet carpet, it’s usually the tenant saying you need to get Auckland Council in to inspect and they say ‘No, no, no’.”

In some places she was aware of, people were still waiting for their landlord to turn up. In others, tenants who could no longer deal with the stench and mould had given the allowed two days’ notice for uninhabitable homes.

“Those that own houses have no options –they have to stay in place.”

This included a scared resident in hard-hit Kapiti Pl by the Sunnynook Bus Station who had previously approached the council over her concerns about the culvert there.

At the Parklane Retirement Village over Sunnynook Rd in Forrest Hill, 35 villas have had to be vacated by residents, some in their 80s and 90s.

“A resident from Parklane came over and said he had never felt so stressed,” Bound said.

While intensification and infrastructure issues were council and government matters, they were at the centre of community concerns.

“It takes everyone to be involved and say that’s not good enough,” said Bound.

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