Shabby and Shambling: Decadent Housing in Greys Avenue

Abstract

In the early part of the twentieth century, Auckland's Grey Street, as Greys Avenue was known until 1927, was home to a Chinese community, and was associated with opium smoking and prostitution, and regarded by some as a "slum." In 1941, with financial support from Auckland City, the Labour government embarked upon a scheme of "slum clearance" in the area. Initially, the government hoped to acquire and clear both sides of Greys Avenue. Housing Division architects prepared a vast scheme for the site, comprising 468 state rental flats. The first portion of this scheme, the Lower Greys Avenue Flats, was built from 1945 to 1947. This paper explores the slum rhetoric that preceded the realisation of the Lower Greys Avenue Flats; the standard of the houses that were deemed to be slums; and the occupations and ethnicities of the occupants who were considered to be slum dwellers. The paper shows that slum language exaggerated the "shabby" and "shambling" standards of the houses. It also shows that much of the land now occupied by the Lower Greys Avenue Flats was in fact cleared prior to 1935, and thus not specifically for this state housing block at all, and that in the latter 1930s and early 1940s, the focus of slum concern was further up the street, with houses that would not be cleared and replaced until the 1950s, '60s and '70s.