Water infrastructure for about 2000 extra homes in Porirua will be the first project paid for from the government's Housing Acceleration fund, Housing Minister Megan Woods has announced.
Photo: RNZ / Dom Thomas
Woods made the announcement at Porirua Harbour this morning, saying the $136 million would create up to 250 jobs to replace sewerage, storm water and water storage infrastructure in the city north of Wellington.
She said it would service the majority of the 19,000 people living in Porirua already and make way for about 2000 new homes.
The works include replacing and upsizing the 3km Bothamley Park sewer trunk pipe, build an additional reservoir at Stemhead Lane in Whitby, and develop a wetland in Cannons Creek to prevent flooding and aid in water management.
Woods said the work was being carried out by the Te Aranga Alliance consisting of Higgins, Goodmans, Beca, Harrison Grierson, Fletcher, Brian Perry Civil and Orogen.
The group would have an emphasis on hiring and upskilling local workers, and was already part way through demolishing 70 old state homes to make way for new ones.
She said the funding was what was needed to get the three projects under way immediately, and would allow the houses to start being built from next year, with the last expected to complete by 2026.
"The funding we're announcing is about bringing forward some of that core work in order to get the building under way sooner."
"We will see ... more houses going in probably at least two to five years ahead of the timeline if we'd just left it on the timeframes that were announced in 2018. They were funding pipelines with council and over a 20-year period.
"We don't have 20 years to wait and that is the whole purpose of the housing acceleration fund."
Fixing the water infrastructure at Bothamley Park would help address the long-term degradation of the harbour by reducing raw sewage flows into the waterways.
"We know that there are times there is raw sewage ... that goes into the harbour. That is not anything that anyone who lives in this community wants to see and it's certainly not something that we as a government wants to see.
"Porirua was built after the war to solve a housing crisis ... the infrastructure that we have in the ground doesn't allow us to do the level of intensification and be good stewards of our environment that we are required to do now to solve the current housing crisis that we're in."
"This is a win-win investment. We're addressing decades of under-investment in water infrastructure by replacing crumbling old pipes and unleashing the potential to build thousands of new homes in the process."
Site investigation work on the new reservoir was expected to begin shortly, with construction expected to begin at the end of 2022 for completion by 2025.
The funding comes from the unallocated funding in the $3.8 billion Housing Acceleration Fund, which aims to speed up the pace and scale of house building through funding large-scale infrastructure funding.
Business case work was being done for further funding in Eastern Porirua, and more decisions on funding from the fund around the country would be made over the coming year.