Housing in New Zealand

Short Film (Full Length) – 1946

This 1946 film surveys New Zealand housing: from settler huts to Ernest Plischke’s modernist flats. Architect William Page bemoans sun-spurning Victorian slums with their unneeded “elaboration”. But more fretful than fretwork is a housing crisis that sees 26,000 families needing homes, with owning or renting out of reach of many. Michael Savage’s pioneering (but war-stalled) state housing scheme and newly-planned suburbs offer hope. Fed by wood and cement, NZ can build again with brio: “For a home is the basis of the simple things that make victory worthwhile.”

A nation’s prosperity isn’t measured in exports and show and false fronts. It’s in the way people live and in how much sun they get, where the kids grow up and in how the sanitation works.
– From the narration