A piece of Christchurch that the property market abandoned after the earthquakes has become home to people abandoned by the property market. The old Bexley neighbourhood was largely cleared after liquefaction made conventional residential development impossible. Houses disappeared, streets remained and the land sat waiting for whatever official purpose would eventually be found for it. Into that gap came people who needed somewhere to live. They arrived in cars, vans, buses and tents. Some were working. Some were retired. Some had children. They did what people have always done when the institutions around them fail, they improvised. A community grew. Earlier this year about 40 people were living around Wetlands Grove; reports now put the number at more than 100. Christchurch City Council has told them they must leave by 28 February 2027 because the area is intended for wetland development. There is an obvious temptation to treat this as a story about homelessness, council planning or the difficulties of finding somewhere suitable for a group of people living in vehicles. It is all of those things, but underneath them sits a much simpler question. What is land for? The answer given by our economic system is that land belongs to whoever has legal title to it, and its legitimate use is determined by owners, planners and institutions. The people actually living on it remain secondary. They may sleep there, look after one another there and make the place usable through their own effort, but none of that gives them any meaningful claim to it. Their relationship to the place exists only for as long as the legal owner tolerates it. That distinction between ownership and use lies close to the heart of the anarchist criticism of private property.
The people living at Wetlands Grove have already demonstrated something that governments spend enormous amounts of money trying unsuccessfully to manufacture through policy documents – people can organise social life themselves. Earlier reporting described an informal community growing around buses, vans and cars, with neighbours helping one another through winter and a communal tent being established as shared space. One man who had been sleeping in a small tent was helped into an old car when the cold became severe. Council rubbish collection and portable toilets made conditions more bearable, but the social organisation of the place came largely from the people living there. Moko, one of the informal figures in the community, was working full-time on an on-call road crew. Others were pensioners. Ngawai Timu described abandoning a $470-a-week rental because she felt she was spending her life paying somebody else’s mortgage. Polly Stewart was surviving on the pension in a bus. Families were living there too, including a woman with several children living from a bus. These details matter because homelessness is constantly spoken about as though it were primarily a pathology of homeless people. Addiction, mental illness, poor budgeting, antisocial behaviour and bad choices are summoned as explanations because those explanations leave the social order intact. They allow us to imagine that housed people possess some quality that homeless people lack. Wetlands Grove makes that story harder to sustain. When people with jobs cannot obtain housing, when pensioners decide rent leaves too little for ordinary life, and when families find themselves competing with dozens of others for a private rental, the problem is no longer plausibly located inside the individual. There are certainly people living rough who struggle with addiction or serious psychological distress. There are also people who get up and go to work from a tent. A housing system that cannot reliably house either has failed at the most elementary level.
New Zealand has become remarkably skilled at describing this failure without challenging the institution producing it. We talk about housing supply, affordability pressures and housing need. We devise eligibility categories and waiting lists. We construct administrative pathways through emergency housing, transitional housing, community housing and social housing. Every stage acquires its own assessments and rules. The language becomes more sophisticated while people remain without homes. At the 2023 Census, Statistics New Zealand estimated that at least 112,496 people were experiencing severe housing deprivation, around 2.3 percent of the usually resident population. The …