A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: A Community in the Cracks of Capitalism (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

A piece of Christchurch that the property market abandoned after the 
earthquakes has become home to people abandoned by the property market. 
The old Bexley neighbourhood was largely cleared after liquefaction made 
conventional residential development impossible. Houses disappeared, 
streets remained and the land sat waiting for whatever official purpose 
would eventually be found for it. Into that gap came people who needed 
somewhere to live. They arrived in cars, vans, buses and tents. Some 
were working. Some were retired. Some had children. They did what people 
have always done when the institutions around them fail, they 
improvised. A community grew. Earlier this year about 40 people were 
living around Wetlands Grove; reports now put the number at more than 
100. Christchurch City Council has told them they must leave by 28 
February 2027 because the area is intended for wetland development. 
There is an obvious temptation to treat this as a story about 
homelessness, council planning or the difficulties of finding somewhere 
suitable for a group of people living in vehicles. It is all of those 
things, but underneath them sits a much simpler question. What is land 
for? The answer given by our economic system is that land belongs to 
whoever has legal title to it, and its legitimate use is determined by 
owners, planners and institutions. The people actually living on it 
remain secondary. They may sleep there, look after one another there and 
make the place usable through their own effort, but none of that gives 
them any meaningful claim to it. Their relationship to the place exists 
only for as long as the legal owner tolerates it. That distinction 
between ownership and use lies close to the heart of the anarchist 
criticism of private property.

The people living at Wetlands Grove have already demonstrated something 
that governments spend enormous amounts of money trying unsuccessfully 
to manufacture through policy documents - people can organise social 
life themselves. Earlier reporting described an informal community 
growing around buses, vans and cars, with neighbours helping one another 
through winter and a communal tent being established as shared space. 
One man who had been sleeping in a small tent was helped into an old car 
when the cold became severe. Council rubbish collection and portable 
toilets made conditions more bearable, but the social organisation of 
the place came largely from the people living there. Moko, one of the 
informal figures in the community, was working full-time on an on-call 
road crew. Others were pensioners. Ngawai Timu described abandoning a 
$470-a-week rental because she felt she was spending her life paying 
somebody else's mortgage. Polly Stewart was surviving on the pension in 
a bus. Families were living there too, including a woman with several 
children living from a bus. These details matter because homelessness is 
constantly spoken about as though it were primarily a pathology of 
homeless people. Addiction, mental illness, poor budgeting, antisocial 
behaviour and bad choices are summoned as explanations because those 
explanations leave the social order intact. They allow us to imagine 
that housed people possess some quality that homeless people lack. 
Wetlands Grove makes that story harder to sustain. When people with jobs 
cannot obtain housing, when pensioners decide rent leaves too little for 
ordinary life, and when families find themselves competing with dozens 
of others for a private rental, the problem is no longer plausibly 
located inside the individual. There are certainly people living rough 
who struggle with addiction or serious psychological distress. There are 
also people who get up and go to work from a tent. A housing system that 
cannot reliably house either has failed at the most elementary level.

New Zealand has become remarkably skilled at describing this failure 
without challenging the institution producing it. We talk about housing 
supply, affordability pressures and housing need. We devise eligibility 
categories and waiting lists. We construct administrative pathways 
through emergency housing, transitional housing, community housing and 
social housing. Every stage acquires its own assessments and rules. The 
language becomes more sophisticated while people remain without homes. 
At the 2023 Census, Statistics New Zealand estimated that at least 
112,496 people were experiencing severe housing deprivation, around 2.3 
percent of the usually resident population. The estimate itself is 
likely conservative because hundreds of thousands of people could not be 
conclusively classified. As of 30 June 2026 there were still 19,002 
applicants on the Housing Register, meaning people already assessed as 
eligible for social housing and waiting to be matched with somewhere 
suitable. Behind every administrative term is the same physical 
requirement humans have had for as long as there have been humans - 
somewhere safe to sleep. Capitalism has managed to turn that requirement 
into an investment class. A house can simultaneously be a place 
necessary for human survival and an asset expected to generate rent, 
capital gain or both. When those purposes conflict, ownership wins. 
Ngawai Timu's remark about paying somebody else's mortgage is therefore 
more politically perceptive than most discussion of the housing crisis. 
Rent appears to be payment for accommodation, but economically it 
transfers part of a tenant's income to somebody who controls access to 
land and housing. The tenant works. The landlord owns. Money moves from 
the former to the latter because the legal structure of property permits 
one person to charge another for access to something they need in order 
to live.

Anarcho-communists have always distinguished personal possession from 
property used to extract income or control the lives of others. Nobody 
is proposing that a person should lose the bed they sleep in or the home 
they actually occupy. The argument concerns the social power created 
when houses and land can be accumulated and withheld by people who do 
not use them, then rented back to those who do. Wetlands Grove shows the 
opposite principle operating almost accidentally. The residents occupy 
land because they need it. Their claim arises from use. They have 
created relationships there and made forms of mutual aid possible there. 
Under capitalist property law none of this ultimately counts for much. 
Christchurch City Council owns the land and has another use planned for 
it, so the residents must go. There is an environmental complication 
here that should not be ducked. The council intends to restore tidal 
wetlands in an area profoundly altered by earthquake damage, and wetland 
restoration is worthwhile. The answer cannot be to demand that 
ecological restoration be sacrificed so people can remain indefinitely 
on land without proper sanitation or infrastructure. The revealing part 
is that we are being offered a choice between the wetland and the people 
living there. A wealthy society ought to be capable of restoring an 
ecosystem while guaranteeing every person displaced by that work 
somewhere secure to live. If it cannot do both, the problem is 
political. The ecological project becomes another deadline imposed upon 
people who already have almost no control over the circumstances of 
their lives.

This is where the word "choice" begins doing dubious work. Some Wetlands 
Grove residents have said they prefer living there. Ngawai Timu spoke 
about the freedom of the place. Polly Stewart compared the prospect of 
living in a Kainga Ora apartment unfavourably with her life in the bus. 
Those views should be taken seriously. People should be allowed far 
greater freedom over how they live than either the private housing 
market or the bureaucratic state usually permits. Cooperative 
settlements, tiny homes, communal land, papakainga, vehicle-based living 
and other arrangements should not automatically be treated as deviant 
because they fail to resemble a suburban house with a mortgage. Yet 
freedom requires genuine alternatives. Choosing a bus because 
conventional rent would consume most of your pension is a peculiar form 
of freedom. Choosing a tent because every rental viewing has another 30 
applicants is not the same as freely deciding to camp. Capitalism 
routinely transforms constrained decisions into evidence of personal 
preference. A worker is "free" to accept an employer's conditions 
because technically nobody forces them to take that particular job. A 
tenant is "free" to accept the rent because another landlord might 
charge the same amount down the road. A homeless person is "free" to 
reject temporary accommodation that is unsuitable for their life. Formal 
choice conceals the distribution of power underneath it.

The state cannot easily solve this because the state is one of the 
institutions maintaining the property relations that produced the 
problem. Governments can build public housing, and they should. They can 
regulate landlords, fund Housing First, provide emergency accommodation 
and prevent evictions. Those measures can keep people alive and they 
matter enormously to anyone who needs them. An anarchist criticism of 
the state does not require indifference to whether somebody has a warm 
house tonight. We should support measures that materially improve 
people's lives while refusing to mistake them for the resolution of the 
underlying conflict. The current Kainga Ora programme illustrates the 
contradiction. The Government says around 900 state houses a year may be 
sold as part of stock renewal while new construction and redevelopment 
will prevent the total national stock from declining. From an 
administrative viewpoint this is portfolio management. From the 
viewpoint of someone sleeping in a vehicle while houses are treated as 
units in a managed asset base, the language feels rather different. 
Housing remains something allocated through institutions according to 
scarcity. The scarcity itself becomes normal.

Wetlands Grove also unsettles another comfortable assumption that order 
flows downward from authority. The community appeared before the council 
had a plan for it. People found the place, negotiated relationships with 
one another and established ways of getting by. That does not mean it is 
an anarchist commune, nor should people living in poverty be turned into 
political mascots. There will be arguments there, difficult 
personalities and all the problems found anywhere humans live together. 
Anarchism does not depend on romanticising people. What matters is that 
social organisation emerged without a landlord designing it or an agency 
assigning everyone a place. The residents discovered one another through 
a shared material predicament and began constructing a community around 
it. Their circumstances are harsh, but the impulse underneath what they 
have made is recognisable. Mutual aid begins with the discovery that 
another person's survival is connected with your own.

The bitter part is that once people create something workable in the 
gaps left by capitalism, authority often arrives to remind them that the 
gap was never theirs. Squatted buildings are emptied while people sleep 
outside. Informal settlements are cleared because they breach 
regulations written for a world in which everyone supposedly has 
conventional housing. People living in vehicles are moved from one 
parking area to another. Public space is made hostile to anyone 
attempting to remain there too long. None of this creates housing. It 
manages visibility. The homeless person disappears from one street and 
appears in another, allowing the first location to be recorded as a 
successful intervention. Wetlands Grove could easily follow the same 
pattern. On 1 March 2027 the council may possess an empty road ready for 
ecological work while the people who lived there are scattered across 
cars, spare rooms, emergency accommodation and some other piece of land 
where they will eventually be noticed again. If that happens, nothing 
will have been solved. Geography will have changed.

The anarcho-communist response begins somewhere else. Housing should be 
organised around use rather than profit. Land should cease to function 
primarily as a commodity. Housing that people need should not be held 
from them because somebody else possesses a stronger legal claim backed 
by money. Communities should have the power and resources to shape the 
places where they live, with decisions made by those affected rather 
than handed down through property ownership or distant administration. 
That does not supply a magic blueprint for Wetlands Grove. It does tell 
us what a decent outcome would look like. Nobody currently living there 
should be made homeless by its closure. People who want conventional 
housing should receive secure, permanent homes before they are required 
to leave. Those who prefer communal or vehicle-based living should be 
involved in establishing another legal, serviced site rather than being 
forced back into a model of housing they have rejected. Families should 
not have to demonstrate months or years of escalating desperation before 
they become sufficiently urgent for assistance. A pensioner should be 
able to rent without sacrificing the income needed to live. A full-time 
worker should not finish a shift and return to a tent.

Perhaps the most revealing sentence spoken at Wetlands Grove came from a 
resident who rejected the description of the people there as homeless. 
"We're refugees in our own country," he said. The phrase is 
uncomfortable, but it captures something important about dispossession. 
These are people surrounded by houses, roads, supermarkets and all the 
accumulated wealth of a developed society, yet somehow unable to secure 
a small portion of it in which to live. Nothing has physically 
disappeared. New Zealand has timber, builders and land. We have 
engineers and electricians. We know how to construct houses. What stands 
between the person and the home is a network of ownership, prices, debt 
and permissions that we have been taught to regard as natural.

There is nothing natural about it. Property is a social arrangement. 
Rent is a social arrangement. The rule that one person may own several 
houses while another sleeps in a car is a social arrangement. These 
things continue because institutions enforce them and because we have 
lived with them long enough to mistake familiarity for inevitability. 
Wetlands Grove briefly exposes the arrangement by turning it upside 
down. People found unused land and used it. They made homes where there 
were no houses. They built a community in the remains of one destroyed 
by an earthquake. Now the official city has returned with plans for the 
land and the authority to move them on. The question facing Christchurch 
is therefore larger than what should happen to a hundred people beside 
an old road in Bexley. It is whether the right to exclude people from 
land should continue to carry more weight than the human need for 
somewhere to live. Until we are prepared to answer that question, New 
Zealand will keep treating homelessness downstream. We will fund 
programmes, adjust waiting lists and move people from one temporary 
arrangement to another while leaving the machinery producing housing 
insecurity largely untouched. Then we will act surprised when another 
Wetlands Grove appears.

It will appear. It has to. People need somewhere to go.

https://awsm.nz/a-community-in-the-cracks-of-capitalism/
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