Pioneer Highway apartments to ease Palmerston North housing need

Property development company Soho Group will be putting a 46-home dent in Palmerston North’s waiting list for housing by February.

It is the designer and property manager behind the multi-storey housing precinct taking shape between Pioneer Highway and Church St at West End.

Soho managing director Sam Wallace said the public housing block was one of several the company was building around New Zealand to relieve the housing shortage.

The firm has a partner in Compass Housing Services New Zealand, which will manage the public rental tenancies while Soho retains responsibility for the buildings and maintenance.

“It’s a 20-year commitment from us,” Wallace told the city council’s infrastructure committee on Wednesday. “We are not just building and getting out.”

The project, being built by local contractors Isles Construction, was one of the first in Palmerston North to resume when New Zealand emerged from the Covid-19 lockdown in April.

It includes 46 one and two-bedroom units across five separate blocks, two of which are three-storey apartment-style buildings.

Wallace said the medium-density project had provided challenges and new approaches to respond to the need for affordable housing.

Although the city council had changed its District Plan to allow for more intensive residential development, it had been a new concept and had taken 63 working days to get through the resource management process.

He said it was a first for the city and there had been lessons for both parties in understanding how to produce a good outcome.

The company had chosen timber rather than steel and concrete as its principal building material, which had helped reduce costs and removed reliance on hired cranes to lift components into position.

Wallace said extra effort had gone into ensuring the buildings were weathertight and water-proof from the outside and inside, and the outsides would be washed annually and repainted regularly. The homes had insulation better than required by the building code and ventilation to help cool them in winter to keep electricity costs down. They did not have solar panels.

Wallace said the company was looking forward to getting people out of cars and motels and into good, safe, warm units that would become their long-term homes.

The complex included a communal laundry for people who did not have their own machines, communal outdoor areas and walkways where people would be encouraged to mingle with their neighbours.

He said Compass would be helping select and place the best mix of tenants, with demand for smaller units coming from single parents with children, the elderly and single men.

Another 18-unit complex was being planned for Palmerston North.

Council housing portfolio spokeswoman Susan Baty said it was fantastic that Soho would be dealing with 10 per cent of the city’s 500-long waiting list for public housing in one project.

“In a couple of years I’m hoping we will have sorted this housing issue in Palmerston North.”

Mayor Grant Smith said he was looking forward to seeing the finished complex from “a commercial developer with a social conscience”.

He hoped preparations for the next development would run more smoothly after the lessons learnt from the first project of its type.

“It needs to be successful for the people living there, the neighbours and the rest of the city.”

Published in Stuff .co.nz Oct 2020
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