page_title: State housing
section_title: The First Labour Government
hierarchical_section_title: State housing / The First Labour Government
caption_attribution_description: English: The Dixon Street Flats from the top of Dixon Street
context_page_description: State housing is a system of public housing in New Zealand, offering low-cost rental housing to residents on low to moderate incomes. Some 69,000 state houses are managed by Kāinga Ora – Homes and Communities, most of which are owned by the Crown. In excess of 31,000 former state houses exist, which are now privately owned after large-scale sell-offs during recent decades. Since 2014, state housing has been part of a wider social housing system, which also includes privately owned low-cost housing.
  An archetypal 1930s and 1940s state house is a detached two- or three-bedroom cottage-style house, with weatherboard or brick veneer cladding, a steep hipped tile roof, and multi-paned timber casement windows. Thousands of these houses were built across New Zealand as state housing, and as private housing after World War II, when the government started selling their drawings and plans in an attempt to hasten housing construction.
context_section_description: At the time it was elected in 1935, the First Labour Government had no plans to introduce state housing. It nationalised the Mortgage Corporation set up in 1935 by the Coalition Government to provide low interest housing loans.
  Following a campaign against slums by the newspaper New Zealand Truth, and the realisation that lending for mortgages was not effective to provide housing to replace them, the Finance Minister Walter Nash announced in the 1936 Budget that 5000 state houses would be built. The houses would be provided by private enterprise, with a Department of Housing Construction set up to oversee the building and the State Advances Corporation to manage the houses. The government intended not only to provide housing, but to stimulate jobs and manufacturing with the construction of the houses, which were to be built from New Zealand materials as far as possible.
  MP John A. Lee was responsible for the programme (and for the use of cheap Reserve Bank 1% credit), but as he was an undersecretary rather than a minister he had limited authority. Sir James Fletcher of Fletcher Construction was a major participant.
  The houses were built in the suburbs, not in the inner cities where the slums were. This was in part because the cost of building in the inner cities was higher, and in part because the government believed that children were better raised in suburban sections rather than on the streets. The urban poor also were largely unable to afford the rents for the new state houses. The government favoured married couples with at least one child as tenants to encourage an increase in the birth rate. Māori were excluded, in part because they could not afford the rentals, but also because the government believed the races should be kept apart.
  Almost all of the state houses built by the Labour Government were detached, with some land on which vegetables could be grown and perhaps a few animals kept. A few were semi-detached, with two or four houses sharing a section. Only about 1.5% of the 30,000 houses constructed by 31 March 1949 were in blocks of flats, all of them in Auckland or the greater Wellington area. The first to be built were the low rise family flats in Berhampore and the largest block was the ten-storey Dixon Street Flats in central Wellington containing 115 one-bedroomed flats for couples and single people.
  The first of the new state houses was completed at 12 Fife Lane in Miramar, Wellington, in 1937. The Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage and several cabinet ministers carried furniture into the house and handed the keys to the tenants. For the opening of the first state house in each major city, a group of cabinet ministers repeated this ceremony. The first tenants, David and Mary McGregor, paid £1 10s 3d ($3.03) rent for 12 Fife Lane, about one-third of their £4 7s 9d ($8.78) weekly income.
  The waiting list for state houses was 10,000 in February 1939. House building could not keep up with the demand, and almost stopped in 1942 as resources were reallocated to meet the needs of the war effort. Although construction resumed in 1944, by the time the war ended in August 1945 the waiting list had grown to 30,000. The government set up transit camps to provide interim accommodation for families waiting for state houses. Priority went to returned soldiers.
  In 1944, the Department of Native Affairs produced a report on the poor housing conditions of Māori in the Auckland suburb of Panmure. This and similar reports caused a change of policy; the government would now build state houses for Māori, to be jointly managed by the State Advances Corporation and the Department of Maori Affairs, which had been renamed in the interim. The new policy was to intersperse Māori and Pakeha (New Zealanders of European ancestry) households ("pepper-potting"), so that Māori could "adjust themselves ... to the pakeha way of living". A rare exception to the interspersal policy was in Waiwhetu in Lower Hutt, where state houses were built around a central marae.
  Although the National Party had opposed state housing in the 1938 electi
caption: The Dixon Street Flats in Wellington
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