Posts by Tom Beard
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Auckland at least used to have Farmer's and now all we have is Whitcoulls and Borders and the coolness around High Street/Vulcan Lane.
Yes, the whole High St/Vulcan Lane/Lorne St was my refuge when I lived in Auckland: now that feels like a city! That and bits of K Rd, though it may have changed a bit in the last ten years and I'm not sure whether that counts as CBD.
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And, frankly, sit on North Head on a sunny Regatta Day and try to tell me that it is not as astonishingly beautiful in every direction as any urban area anywhere.
True, but I think that what would make that beautiful is not what makes it an "urban area", but the opposite. To me, a beautiful urban area would be the Rockefeller Centre with its ice rink, or the back streets of Spitalfields on a foggy night, or Vieux Nice during the Fete de la Musique, or looking from Frank Kitts Lagoon across Civic Square while there's a concert on the water, or just about anywhere in Venice at any time at all. The beauty of an urban area is due to its buildings and people, not yachts and hills and sparkling water. That can be beautiful, sure, but beautiful despite the city rather than because of it.
I have to beg to differ, Auckland does feel like a city. As a voluntary expat who sees a lot of big big cities, most cities I travel to are chaotic, sprawling and essentially badly planned. Think NYC, London, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Sydney, LA. As they grow, they sprawl
I think you have a different view of what constitutes a "city": I'd hardly count LA as one. London and NYC may sprawl on their outskirts, but at their centres it's possible to walk for hours among dense urban areas, and through distinct neighbourhoods, without ever feeling that you've strayed into the suburbs. If Ponsonby, Newmarket and Parnell were contiguous with Auckland CBD, maybe it would feel the same, but at the moment I don't think it does.
I love Wellington but its a polite large town.
I guess its "politeness" might depend upon which circles you move in, but I'd say it's definitely a small city rather than a large town. As of 2001 (still awaiting the equivalent 2006 census data), Wellington's CBD had slightly more workers than Auckland's. That means that Wellington, while undoubtedly a small city by world standards, has a CBD equivalent to that of a "metropolis" of 1 million. Add to that the fact that you can walk to the entertainment and bohemian quarters without crossing through residential or light industrial zones, and that it has all the civic infrastructure one expects from the cpaital of a sovereign nation, and you'll see why I characterise it as feeling like a small, but nonetheless "proper" city.
You'll see that my perspective is that of a pedestrian, and that my definition of a "city" is unashamedly Eurocentric and old-fashioned: I dont have that much experience with Asian megacities and I don't like the sprawling car-dependent western US conurbations. There's a phrase that Rem Koolhaas and his students used: they were working on a "Project on what used to be The City", and I think that characterises the "chaotic, sprawling and essentially badly planned" metropolises that you mostly mention. Unfortunately, that's what "the city" is becoming in much of the world, but it's not what I (or presumably David) would call a "proper city".
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I love the staid bustle of Lambton Quay and the Wellington waterfront. I love the trolley buses, and the cable-car to the botanic gardens. I love the green belt that swaddles the city. And I love the commuter rail system -- public transport that actually works! Wellington feels like a proper city: the sort they have in other countries. In comparison, Christchurch and Dunedin are merely towns, and Auckland is just an oversized suburb.
Brilliant! Can I steal that as a tagline for my blog?
We are the L.e.d.s.
Great stuff. I quite liked the Thomas:Parkes album, but I like this even more.
Isn't it great that the Gang of Four, Bow Wow Wow, the Cure, Adam and the Ants, New Order are having their day in the sun again?
What do you think of the Nouvelle Vague albums?
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And if I had to give advice to homophobic parents, I'd say it's not the "gay bands" you'd have to worry about. If your confused young lad's listening habits include Cher, Barbra Streisand, Kylie and the collected works of Andrew Lloyd Webber, it's time to start praying.
And what's with this "Oscar Wilde (reformed homosexual)" bit? Shurely shome mishtake? (or pisstake, more likely)
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It's just as well Frank Sinatra is dead: I'd like to have seen his reaction to being listed as gay!
BTW, I'd love to comment on the serious stuff, but PS Code of Conduct and all that...
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Meanwhile, you may find his list of gay bands to steer clear of useful
Frankie Goes to Hollywood? Elton John? Melissa Etheridge? Village People?
Who'd've thunk it?
But they missed some obvious ones: Bronski Beat, Cliff Richard...
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Tom, I think you will find that interest costs for residential owner occupied housing have *not* been included in the CPI since 1999
Mea culpa: blame it on me extrapolating half-heard radio reports about "house prices driving up the cost of living". Personally, since I've never owned property and have no intention to do so, I always thought it odd that they considered it part of "the cost of living", but if it's not actually part of the CPI then that makes sense.
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I don't think that is actually true if you look back to before the "car is king" era. The older areas of central Auckland didn't have large sections. They had modest front and back gardens and the houses were close together. In Ponsonby there are still lots of pre-villa era two-story cottages.
True: that's why I said we don't have "much" tradition, rather than none. There are some good city-fringe neighbourhoods in Wellington too (Mt Vic, The Terrace, Mt Cook) with decent density, but I'm not sure they count as "urban living" compared to inner residential parts of London, Paris or Barcelona. Tall, narrow detached houses, with small gardens, can produce quite reasonable densities while still appealing to families (as I wrote about last year). When I talk about "urban living", though, I'm thinking more about terraced or multi-family dwellings.
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Are there any stats that measure something like the number of bedrooms or the square metres of space available per head of population?
Probably bedrooms per head: it's possible to derive overcrowding indices from census stats, so when the detailed 2006 data is released (in a month or so) it'll be possible to analyse where the overcrowding is. It's important to differentiate "overcrowding" from density: the former (as you say) is a measure of people per bedroom or per interior square metre; the latter is a measure of people per hectare of land. Some of the most overcrowded areas are in places with very low population density by international standards: the problem isn't high density housing but a lack of it.
I'd be very intererested to know that, because it would help tease apart the extent to what price is being driven up by actual shortage vs speculators.
One thing that should help tell you that is the ratio of house prices to rentals. When house prices go up faster than rents, it's a fair bet that they're not being driven by demand for a place to live, but by an expectation of capital gains.
It always seems silly to me that the cost of paying off a mortgage is included in the CPI: that's not the cost of living but the cost of investing. When the Reserve Bank puts up interest rates in an attempt to slow down inflation, it's immediately feeding into one of the components of inflation itself!