The Lawrey Story

Nelson faces an increasing number of challenges when it comes to attracting people and businesses into its downtown area. With a number of significant projects falling over or stalling, Matt Lawrey thinks the time has come for the city to get innovative with its airspace.

If there’s one thing I’m hearing a lot these days, it’s that Nelson’s central city could do with a lift. The consensus seems to be that it’s not living up to its potential; that the place is looking a bit tired and feeling less buzzy than it did pre-Covid.

Internationally, one of the things that has made the biggest difference to cities’ fortunes has been the growth of inner-city populations. The well-documented benefits include more people spending money in local businesses, places becoming safer at night, and more buzz, which attracts people who live in the burbs to come into town.

Tragically, just as our need for inner-city living has increased, the cost of building has gone through the roof. Of course, it’s not just the cost of materials and labour that’s putting developers off. The price of land is still a major challenge.

What people miss, however, is that it should be possible to build apartments in central Nelson without having to front up for the cost of the land. That’s because the city owns vast quantities of prime real estate that would be perfect for medium-rise housing. I’m talking about our parking squares.

Criminally under-utilised, the squares constitute some of the most valuable land in Te Tau Ihu and, with the exception of Montgomery Square on Saturdays, all we do with them is use them for the temporary storage of motor vehicles.

With this in mind, last year I collaborated with architect Pierre Hammond and landscape architect Ursula Bowman on a concept that retains the parking capacity of the squares while utilising the space above them for housing. We called the idea Airspace Apartments and, as the cost of building puts the squeeze of development, I reckon it’s something the council should take a serious look at.

Essentially, we’re talking about creating covered public carparks with housing above. The council provides the land, developers provide the building, and together they share the benefits. The city ends up with hundreds, potentially thousands, of inner-city residents, the developers get to build without having to pay for land, and the council potentially gets a new source of income in the form of leases.

Not only that, but the city could score all these benefits while keeping its carparks. By incorporating plantings into the design, you could make the city greener. You could also build the apartments out of wood. One of the nicest things about the concept was the positive reaction it got from a wide range of interesting people, including Mevo carshare company founder Erik Zydervelt.

Erik loved the idea and could easily imagine a Mevo facility incorporated into the design for the building’s residents and nearby businesses.

"We need more projects such as this that are big, bold, and sometimes even a little scary, if we want our homes in New Zealand cities to be truly world-leading and not look like they are stuck in the 80s,” he said.

Bill McKay, Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland, also got behind the idea, telling Radio New Zealand: “the concept addresses the housing crisis and climate crisis and it’ll bring more money into the heart of the city, both in terms of the initial build and then the long term impact of having hundreds of people living in town and spending money in local shops. I think it’s an absolutely terrific idea that can be applied in a lot of places.”

With the new library on life support, the Science and Tech Precinct dead and buried, and the gondola apparently a goner, I can’t help thinking Airspace Apartments might be just the project the city needs. The future doesn’t have to be one where we watch the central city go into slow and inevitable decline. It could actually be really exciting, but we won’t get there if we keep doing things the way we’ve always done them.

By Matt Lawrey