A Country Town with Urban Problems

I get a lot of calls for more articles on the difference between Town and Country, and often from the frustrated point of country folk grumpy about urban power based decisions affecting their lives. So I thought I would cover the challenges faced by one of the few rural power-growth towns and whether the citizens there can learn from the experience of city dwellers, who have faced (and often stuffed up) the same challenges in the past.

I am talking of Kerikeri, which is enjoying meteoric growth taking it from being voted NZ’s Best Small Town a few years back to being NZ’s best small city in the not too distant future.
Like all high growth towns, recent arrivals now outnumber long-term residents and the stress levels are rising. The "Johnny come lately" types are generally unaware of the history of the town and want it kept exactly as it was on the day that they arrived, blissfully unaware that the growth which brought them has been running strongly for 30 years at least, and was even then the product of some visionary town founders who subdivided orchard blocks in the 1920s to settle wealthy expats escaping the Boxer revolution in China.

The current debate raging there stems from a group of recent arrivals objecting to a proposal to erect a 7 storey building in the very limited town centre area. All sorts of complete balderdash about shadows for example are being bandied about as if these only exist in Kerikeri and the rest of the world where high rise buildings not only exist, but enrich communities have not solved the shadow problem.

The point is if strong growth is occurring either the town goes out or up. If it is to be the world’s first city with only two storey buildings it is going to have to eat up all the lovely citrus orchards and fine topsoil for miles around, and that is just not in the town’s best interest, let alone the nation’s.

Back in 1936 one of the town’s visionaries erected a 3 storey building in the middle of an open area in the town surrounded only by the odd low hedge. This building must have looked more out of context then than any 7 storey building would now, particularly in a town that has just built the largest New World supermarket North of the Harbour Bridge. The building erected in 1936 was the Cathay Cinema, so named for the area that the town’s leaders had emigrated from, and it became the centre of the town’s social life for the next seventy years remaining open throughout the early TV years that shut so many rural cinemas in NZ.Today it still functions as a fine cinema/restaurant complex.

It goes without saying that 100 years earlier the country’s first high rise being the 3 storey Stone Store was erected in Kerikeri.The group who currently oppose any high rise would have squashed both of these had they been around then.

Bizarrely the protesters have named themselves "Vision Kerikeri" presumably as the full name of "Myopic One Eyed Vision Kerikeri" was a bit long.

What is really needed is a group aware of the past and with an eye on the lessons learned in larger cities, such as Auckland where failure to take the opportunities for future growth such as outlined by Mayor Robbie for underground railways, has presented insurmountable difficulties today. Such a group would be termed "Visionary Kerikeri"

This wonderful town does need debate on its future. Citizens should be much more worried at the creeping of cheap and nasty commercial development along the main road into the town, gradually eroding the lovely trees and orchards that give it its wonderful character.
New Zealanders at large need to be interested as Kerikeri is one of the country’s iconic towns, containing as it does the Stone Store and the Kemp House at the Stone Store Basin. Taxpayers have recently been called upon by the government to pay for a bypass road around this area, which gives the town its two core values of Heritage and Horticulture.

This well intentioned expense is yet another example of an expensive stuff up where the decisions have all been made by people without training, without understanding the issues and based on completely false statements still espoused to support such expense. NZHPT still quote "vibrations caused by heavy traffic crossing the bridge are causing damage to the Stone Store". As the engineer who restored this wonderful building I can state that was not a cause. The flood threat from the bridge does exist but a new single span bridge in the same place would have fixed that. However thanks taxpayers.

Let’s hope wisdom prevails over backward thinking.

WAYNE BROWN