Auckland’s Most Whitewashed Strip (literally)

One of thing that repeatedly makes my Daily List of Things That Annoy Me is this little campaign in the featured imaged up to.

I mean, that image is beyond stupid, for a bunch of reasons which I’m going to cover. But a little background, first. It comes from the website ‘iloveponsonby.co.nz’, which appeared on a lot of Pride Parade posters. I Love Ponsonby, the website for which has spawned the equally tone-deaf ‘Ponsonby: Auckland’s Hippest Strip’. It’s a campaign run by the Ponsonby Business Association to promote Ponsonby, It’s also one of the most historically ignorant things I’ve seen, and one that ignores the ongoing gentrification in Karangahape Road.

Well, ignorance is the best case scenario. The more negative, left-wing side of me sees a bunch of people celebrating the gentrification they made and perpetuate into the surrounding isthmus areas. Especially one of my favourite parts of the whole city -Karangahape Road, that grand old, well-trodden ridge-line that is rapidly becoming a whitewashed, gentrified hellhole with too-clean quirky stationary stores and a characterless St Kevin’s Arcade that’s already painted over the graffiti and is now infested with bearded white men on bicycles coming out of the vegan specialty store.

But of course, where does this all come from? Karangahape changing was an inevitability since the 1980s. It has already gentrified somewhat – the surrounding suburbs were repeatedly decimated by motorway construction and the gentrification of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn changed the decidedly Polynesian character of the street, to the point only a few shops and churches remain. Only the ‘seedy’ element survived the 1980s,  or arrived in the 1990s, and now the gentrification of the 1980s has come to claim inner city Auckland.

But what happened in the 1980s? Well, in the long history of the strip, the history that produced this image, is a history of gentrification. Ponsonby was once a diverse, working-class suburb dominated by students and Polynesian immigrants. Hence, the churches you can still see. In the 1980s, white yuppies moved into Ponsonby and Grey Lynn and abolished multiculturalism, pushing out the people who lived there into the west isthmus and into South Auckland.  That’s the gist: obviously, it’s more complicated than that quick paragraph, but that’s essentially what happened. Ponsonby and Grey Lynn are effectively Auckland’s take on Greenwich Village or Soho: ‘cultured’ places where the culture was pushed out by rising rents and property values.

So that’s why that image gets me so much. It’s why I grit my teeth at the quirky stationary store. Because the gentrification didn’t actually stop: what happened in those inner city areas is now spreading to the rest of the isthmus, but in particular Karangahape. K Road has long lost the strong Polynesian migrant community that shared the strip with the Las Vegas (in fact both are now going or gone. RIP Anatomically Incorrect Boobie Lady). Most of the ‘seedy element’ has already been pushed off the main strip into the more dangerous areas of Canada St and Mercury Lane, as well as the other Newton backstreets that face onto the motorway. And it seems that people are are actively celebrating the destruction of the community; or worse, they’re not even talking about it. It’s ‘urban regeneration’ to the public transport advocates, or cleaning up the street, or ‘development of rough areas’. Let’s dispose of the euphemisms for celebrating and admit it: the last of the poor people are leaving inner Auckland to the ‘creative class’ that created this image up top and the contention of ‘Hippest Strip’. Let’s talk about that, instead.

I’m looking at you, queer community. Maybe it’s time to talk about our class problem, kapeesh?