Young people leaving, shops closing, restaurants and bars going belly up. How alive are Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch? Julie Hill checks our three biggest cities for a pulse.
For three glorious years in the 1990s, a show called City Life aired on TV2, featuring a crew of hot young Gen X Aucklanders all living in the same apartment block. They were flash digs, considering one was a bar tender, one a stand-up comedian and the rest seemingly unemployed. They caroused at Verona, the Lava Lounge and Cause Célèbre. As a South Island teen, I was deeply impressed.
Fast forward three decades, and our news media has pronounced our biggest city dead, dangerous and desperately lacking in main character energy. Crime rates are up. Shops are closing down – and not just newcomers; long-standing retail outlets like the three Huckleberry/Harvest stores, which sold health conscious Aucklanders their mung beans for more than three decades, have liquidated; while the city’s beloved (if not often frequented) old-style department store Smith & Caughey’s, a Christmas institution for generations, is at the very least to be scaling down.
And the same goes for a slew of beloved restaurants and bars: Fitzroy, Everybody’s, Roxy, East St Hall, Conch, Chapel , Omni, Tiger Burger, Pilkingtons, Homeland, Madame George to name a few, (though thankfully not SPQR).
The midtown area surrounding Aotea Square could politely be described as a work in progress. Its entertainment complex SkyWorld, once a dazzling vision of the future, is now, according to one shopkeeper I spoke to, a “dystopian nightmare”. There’ll be at least another year of disruption from the creation of the City Rail Link. And on top of that there are orange cones… everywhere.
Yarns out of Pōneke, Wellington are equally fatalistic. The loss of 5000 public sector jobs and counting has reportedly hit Lambton Quay like a tidal wave, sweeping away with it retail and hospitality – Hiakai, Field & Green, Shepherd, Tulsi, Milk Crate, Egmont St Eatery, Amok, and just yesterday Pandoro closed its three cafes, losing more than 20 staff.
You can blame one of the harshest economic climates we’ve faced in decades. You can blame the internet. But is it any surprise that young people are leaving the country, mainly for Australia, in literal droves? Have our once sparkly urban centres dissolved into boring backwaters? Are we, as our prime Mminister put it, a bunch of wet, whiny, inward-looking Negative Nellies?
Or do we need to harden up and believe in a very imminent future, when trains will be running, the road cones will be gone, the economy will perk up and our urban centres will see a revival?
Dying – or just changing?
Recently, I started working in downtown Auckland, and have noticed a few things. Empty stores. Vape shops. Hardly anyone going into Prada or Gucci. Heaps of Community Patrol Officers, who are dressed like cops but don’t have police powers.
But, contrary to popular opinion, downtown is definitely not dead. Nor is it even considering retirement. I would even call it heaving. Great flocks of university students swoop and forage, probably wishing, as I often do, that there were more relaxed and affordable dining options open past 3.30 in the afternoon.
There are a lot more rough sleepers than in the City Life days but, then again, the population of central Auckland has quadrupled since the 1990s. And, even if Queen Street is in its makeover era, nearby Britomart is sparkling, and Silo Park and the Viaduct are popping off. Could it be that all the people dissing downtown just don’t come here that much?
Remembering the high times
Owner of iconic store Unity Books, Auckland, Jo McColl never watched City Life (she was more the Gloss era) but her eyes light up when she recalls working on Auckland’s High Street in the 1990s. “It was full of restaurants and hairdressers, nightclubs and high-end New Zealand fashion, and it was really humming. Rossini’s [Italian restaurant] opened at the same time as us, World opened at the same time.”
In 2024, restaurants are scarcer and much of the fashion world has moved down to Britomart. McColl says foot traffic has petered out since May. “I meet people all the time who say, ‘I love your shop but I never go into the city anymore’. People are scared to come in here at night time because people have been shot and beaten up for no reason at all.”
After the Vomitron ride our independent bookstores have been on in recent years, this one is thriving, partly for unexpected reasons. “When you look around the shop, it’s full of young people. It’s heartening. BookTok has been fantastic for young people finding old books.”
As for the rest of the city, McColl has a simple solution for the lack of buzz: more stuff to do. “When we had the rugby, people from all over the country came up and it felt great, like the old days. We had the Choir Games here, and there were all these people wandering around with lanyards on. “Everyone’s hoping that once we get warmer weather and the cruise ships come back, people will come back in.”
Auckland CBD: young and multicultural
Barbara Holloway, head of Auckland Council’s city centre activation, spent decades living out west in the bush, but for many years has been firmly entrenched in the centre of town. Her happy place is what she calls “the Mighty K”, Karangahape Road. She once proclaimed that Auckland is just like New York City with better weather. That’s an audacious claim, even for someone whose job it is to promote the city – does she stand by it?
Indeed she does. “I absolutely love it. I walk around at night and I’m not nervous at all. I wake up on Saturday morning and think, I’ll go down to the market at Britomart and then I’ll go to the art gallery for a free show. I can walk to work, eat any food at any price of any gorgeous ethnicity. It’s just magic. It’s like being in the middle of London or Melbourne.”
But better. “In those bigger cities, it’s harder to access things because they’re so giant whereas all the creative and night-time action happens between Britomart and K Road. So it’s easy to access for 50 cents [on the CityLink bus] or, in my case, a Gold Card.”
In Holloway’s role restoring life to the central city’s ghostlier zones, she’s filled empty stores with art, had young opera singers perform and initiated artist residencies in the elegant but under-occupied Strand Arcade. She helped lure from out west to downtown the blockbuster K-festival, which attracts close to half of Auckland’s 27,000 Korean residents.
Holloway says the focus should be on catering for the demographic that actually lives nearby and hangs out here. “This is a huge student area, and there are so many Asian students living here. The precinct is only 40 percent European now. They are young students and migrants, not married, up for going out.”
Christchurch ‘exciting, growing’
Amid the reports of economic doldrums all around the country, one quite substantial area is gently bucking that trend and it’s called the South Island.
Shelley Erskine is marketing and communications manager for The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora. She’s formerly an Invercargilite, which you can tell from the way she rolls her R’s. She’s also lived London then relocated to Ōtautahi after the earthquakes. She says Christchurch is doing fine, thanks very much.
Erskine points to the fact that homes are cheaper to buy in Christchurch than in Auckland or Wellington and renters get a better deal. And, 14 years after the quakes, the vibe is good. “It’s an exciting, innovative, growing city, a great place to live.”
She quotes a 2022 survey that scores Christchurch top points for work/life balance, and also states that a third of Christchurchians thought the city had improved in the past year, as opposed to just 13 percent of Aucklanders and a meagre five percent of Wellingtonians.
That’s not to say the Arts Centre hasn’t had a bumpy year, after it fell off Christchurch City Council’s draft long-term plan. That could have meant curtains for the trust, which leases out the largest collection of heritage buildings in the country for arts and culture purposes. The buildings were badly damaged in the quakes and have just undergone a $205 million restoration.
A community campaign has saved the day – for now. “The Council received 7000 submissions in total,” says Erskine. “We didn’t get all the funding we were after but it’s enough to keep everyone going in the short to medium term.”
Erskine says more graft is needed to entice people out of the suburbs, where many retreated during the earthquakes, and lure them back into the city centre. But “Christchurch is an exciting place to be at the moment. There are so many new things happening and developing. It still feels like a small city, everything is within 20 minutes, it’s a great vibe.”
Wellington: ‘Scarf up until early November’
Gen Xer Jeremy Taylor reviews music on RNZ and has worked in the iconic Wellington record shop Slowboat, on Cuba Street, for roughly 100 years. He was born in Timaru and spent his golden years in Christchurch, playing in bands and solo at a trendy pizza restaurant. He’s heartened to see Christchurch enjoying a renaissance “because things there felt very tough”.
He can’t deny that Pōneke is experiencing a bit of a lull but, as a Southern Man, but as we leave behind another winter, he’s dismissive. “People are always surprised by the fact that it gets a bit cold and shitty here, same time every year. I say scarf up until early November. And get an umbrella.”
Taylor says people in the city feel “cautious”, having been laid off or fearing it might be on the cards. Some are being rehired as contractors. But he doesn’t see a dearth of young ‘uns. “If anything, Wellington seems to be inundated with young people studying, bringing with them energy and excitement. It feels like they are less cynical than we were.”
Does Wellington still consider itself our cultural Mecca? “I feel like Wellington was a bit high on its own supply a while ago. All those ‘coolest little Capital’-type self-descriptors aged very poorly, and kind of made the rest of New Zealand hate us.” For now, the Capital city just needs to suck it up. “We will be back, better, wiser, hopefully a bit less smug.”
Crime: perceptions and realities
In an essay titled In the Shadow of Silicon Valley, essayist Rebecca Solnit laments that her hometown San Francisco has become known as “a cauldron of crime and depravity”. Media, often of the right-leaning flavour, tell dark stories about the city’s crime, homelessness and fentanyl crisis, which Solnit admits is real but hardly unique to San Francisco. On a trip to New Mexico, people “wanted to know how I was surviving the mayhem”.
In reality, she argues, levels of violent crime are lower in San Francisco than in many American cities. Seeing more unhoused people on the streets, writes Solnit, makes people stay indoors, but there’s a false equivalence between homelessness and crime. “If you equate your wealth with virtue, you tend to equate poverty with vice, and the enemies of the homeless routinely portray them as criminals.”
In the same way, despite our own sometimes hysterical reporting, the Ministry of Justice’s recent Crime and Victims Survey tells us crime is not up but steady. Auckland City Mission says while some unhoused people commit crimes, most others don’t, just like the general population.
On a Thursday night in downtown Auckland, Britomart Group is hosting a talk on perceptions of the central city. Just like Rebecca Solnit, host Jeremy Hansen says his family have called, worried for his safety after hearing catastrophist media reporting.
‘City of many cultures’
Malaysian commerce and law student Ken Lee says he chose to study in Auckland because it’s a “city of many cultures”, and he was interested in learning about tikanga Māori.
Lee says it can be hard for overseas students to find flats when they don’t have referees.
He and his mates, who live in town too, travel all the way out to Costco to buy essentials like toilet paper because the inner-city supermarkets are so expensive. And they’d love a few more places to go at night that aren’t all about drinking.
But he finds his rent reasonable and his flat comfortable, and the minimum wage compared to Malaysia “really not that bad”. He’s unphased by the reports of crime. “There will always be an element of crime and/or danger anywhere you go.”
Gyles Bendall from Eke Panuku, the Council-controlled urban regeneration team, discusses the City Centre Masterplan, which sounds evil but is in fact a 20-year co-pro with Council and Auckland Transport to zhuzh up the city centre.
When it’s done we’ll have, among other things, a revamped Victoria Street, an improved midtown and a fancy new downtown and waterfront precinct. Best of all, Aucklanders will be able to travel back in time to a century ago, when we were properly connected to each other via accessible public transport.
It does seem promising. Maybe we just have to be patient.
Inspired ideas
In Britomart’s publication, This is our place, central city residents offered tips on glowing up the city. One of those was the much loved and respected artist Reina Sutton, a Tāmaki Makaurau advocate who died unexpectedly in July.
Sutton was born in the Solomon Islands before settling in Manurewa. She then moved downtown, where she lived and worked for the Council as an Arts and Culture Programmer. She was known for her generous support of other artists.
One way to “bring energy and activity to empty stores”, she suggested, was more collaborations between shops and artists. She wished Aotea Square had a touch rugby pitch or volleyball court, which I reckon is inspired.
And Sutton posed an idea that translates to every city in Aotearoa. “Treat the central city as the closely connected village that it is.”
Julie Hill is a writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
