From Living Wage to Living City.

The Heathcote candidate taking on housing, wages, and asset investment for a brighter future for Christchurch.

Nathaniel Herz Jardine has lived across the Heathcote ward, from seaside Sumner to leafy Opawa and now settled in Waltham. He has worked as an organiser for the Living Wage Movement and is standing to be councillor for Heathcote. We sat down with Nathaniel in Hansen Park, along the banks of the Ōpāwaho-Heathcote River, to discuss what he stands for in the ward and the wider city.

Heathcote is such a diverse ward, tell me your vision for it.

The thing that’s exciting about the Heathcote ward is that it has everything in it that makes Christchurch such a unique place. It starts with the beach, the estuary, the Port Hills, then it runs along the Heathcote River and all the way into Sydenham.

We’ve got the city, we’ve got the hills, we’ve got biodiversity, coastal adaptation, fire hazards, we’ve got infill housing in local developments. It’s like a microcosm of all the problems we’re facing as a city as a whole.

You’ve spoken a lot about housing affordability in the city, what will you do to address this? 

At the moment we are in this paradox in Christchurch. On the one hand all these houses are springing up like mushrooms across the city, and pretty much the same house is being built all over the city. Generally two-bedroom, staircase, low quality, ugly builds - but the housing is still pretty expensive. It’s clear we are not building the homes that work for us long-term as a city.

What I think we need to be doing as council is to get a lot more involved in housing and working with developers and doing a lot more of our own developments and social housing. And using a lot more of those interesting ideas like inclusionary zoning where we are ensuring that developers dedicate a certain proportion of their builds for affordable housing, or that they are paying the council so they can do it themselves.

Where do AirBnBs and short-term stays fit in the city’s housing crisis?

Short-stay accommodation destroys cities, we’ve seen it in Europe in big tourist centres which become ghost towns. There’s no community. These are spaces that are supposed to be for families to live in, for retirees, for students, and instead it's just a different person living there day in and day out. One of the reasons it’s so destructive is because it’s a very low density way of doing tourist accommodation.  

The goal should be that it’s not permitted to use standard housing for short-stay accommodation. Short-stay accommodation, especially in cities, should only really be done by hotels and built for purpose facilities. 

There were a few big wins while you were working on the Living Wage movement including getting the CCC and ECan living wage accredited, what’s next in ensuring residents have access to good wages? 

There are still some big gaps that I tried to fill while working as an organiser. One of them is a living wage in council spaces. So currently if you work directly for the council or have a service contract with the council you’re going to get a living wage; that’s cleaners and security guards for example. The loophole is those businesses who lease council land. So that’s the cafés in our libraries and rec centres, and over at the airport which is 75% owned by the council, all those fast food outlets and shops could all be on minimum wage. 

In this case it would be amending the leasing policy. First of all for the council itself, so anyone who is leasing directly council-owned spaces, like the library, would have to pay their workers while they are working on the leased land a living wage. When we’ve got that working we would expand it out to the council-controlled organisations like the airport. 

What will you do to preserve an authentic and thriving cultural scene and nightlife in Christchurch?

One big piece of the puzzle in our arts scene that we are still missing is a medium-sized venue. So a venue with a capacity of 500 up to 1000, which allows those mid-sized bands to play a good, profitable set. Making it worthwhile for them to come to Christchurch when touring New Zealand.

We’re also missing some of those lower steps as well, before the earthquakes we had some really good youth venues in Christchurch. And those venues had the ability to offer a matinee show for under 18s and then they can do that show in the evening too. It creates really good exposure for young people to see live music and creates a space for high school bands to play. More broadly I want more emphasis on the arts funding in Christchurch to be on the grassroots, and less emphasis on the big legacy arts institutions. 

Where do you stand on the sale of public assets?

Every time politicians who just want a short term sugar-rush, so they can meet some arbitrary promise that they made about rates for one year before it skyrockets the next year, love to push for asset sales. I’m really worried about this, I’ve done a lot of work with workers at Lyttelton Port on this issue before, and if you talk to anyone they know someone who has died at the port because of safety issues. It’s only because of public ownership that we’ve been able to get a lot of improvement on those issues. If we start selling-off our public infrastructure, we are going to see workers dying again due to safety issues and we are also going to see the profits from those assets going overseas. 

What will you do to protect the environment and biodiversity of this ward and of the city?

There’s still a lot to do. I’m always amazed how much better the river is than when I was a kid but it’s still not great. The planting that’s happening along the river is fantastic, the council needs to keep funding that. The returns we get from the funding we provide is incredible. Basically we provide plants and hundreds of volunteer hours are provided by the community. As there’s more biodiversity on the hills we are going to start seeing more birds coming back. We need to protect them. We need to set up, and this is something I think we can do in one term on council, trap lines on council land all along the river.

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