Anne and Martin

Christchurch flat land red zone

Area 5: Dallington, Burwood, Avonside

Red zoned in June 2011 due to liquefaction probability

Living on the red zone/green zone border

Anne and Martin’s story

Martin I’m now 58 years old and I come from Bavaria. Before my 40th birthday I took a sabbatical − I was a Catholic priest for about 14 years of my life − and I decided to spend it in New Zealand. I was already rethinking what I would do for the rest of my life. I liked being a priest but I didn’t really embrace celibacy. It was really lonely. I come from a big family background and when I realised that it means living on your own I just didn’t want that. I decided to quit, and after thinking about it I thought I’d go to New Zealand. I’d heard a lot of good things, and one of the things I liked about New Zealand was there was the first female Anglican bishop in Dunedin. And I thought, I want to go and see this country, it is so beautiful and kind of advanced.

Then I fell in love with Anne and we decided we’d give it a go. I wrote a letter from here to my Bishop and quit. Anne and I, we travelled to Germany and were married there, in Bavaria, then we applied for residency and moved to New Zealand. It was 18 years ago this year. We had known each other for about a year before we married, and Anne had bought this house before that. I am a New Zealand resident, a permanent resident.

Anne Martin has worked as a teacher and I worked as a teacher aide. Then I found I could no longer tolerate Wi-Fi in schools − it made me ill and gave me migraines − so I left and did a bit of freelance writing. After the earthquakes the high-voltage lines went up. I’m also electrically hypersensitive and that affected my ability to concentrate in my house. Those lines have just gone down now, but I’ve still got ongoing problems as a result of the long-term exposure. I lived a lot away from the house in the early years. There were a lot of houses behind us that used the high-voltage lines.

Reasons for agreeing to the interview

Martin This talking things through is nice for us, a healing experience, and I thank you for coming to us and taking us seriously. It has been healing and helpful for us. If we can help somebody else, it’s not entirely in vain.

Anne That’s how we rebuild as a society, isn’t it? Always looking at what can we learn from this?

Anne and Martin’s property

Anne We’ve owned the home for 19 years, and when we came from Germany 18 years ago that’s when we first lived here, and we’ve been here ever since. [Home is] the place that nurtures you, that you come back to after a hard day outside. … There’s no insecurity about it; that we can put in potatoes for another year…

Martin We financed it together. And that was our house. More than a house it’s a home. We got this offer of $257,000 from CERA [Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority] and we looked at it. On the one hand we had this house, and on the other hand we would have got the $257,000. And we said no, we’d rather have the house. That was our decision. We liked the house because it had done very well in the earthquake and also it had done very well over these years with Anne’s health. Her health condition is chemical sensitivity, and we made sure that everything was right in the house, so we said everything else is a risk.

Anne I bought a house before and have never been able to spend a night in it: I thought that it would be OK but there was something there. So it was great anxiety when we looked for a house that was just untreated wood. Our house was in a very poor state, so that when we renovated it we knew the products we were using and we also renovated and then left it to out-gas for half a year. So yes, the house means a lot to us because I can’t go into a new subdivision, and under the new Building Code I can’t build a new home with untreated wood. So it’s very good for me. I don’t metabolise it like people should.

Martin We both were a bit tense because we said what’s going to happen with us?

Anne I was desperate.

Martin We were tense because we had decided that we would not take the financial offer of our rating value, so we didn’t know what it all meant because it was unclear what red zoning meant.

Reasons for staying

Anne I’m totally reliant on this place because I have multiple health conditions that mean I need a house that doesn’t have any treated chemical products in it. Also, we live very close to my elderly parents who are in their 80s, and this has been a harrowing year for them. My father has multiple myeloma, which is a type of blood cancer in the bone marrow, and it’s been a year of phone calls in the middle of the night and hospital admissions. Last week my mother was in hospital. On another occasion I popped in to see my father and he had just collapsed because of an infection due to the chemotherapy he was on. I see them daily and Martin and I are the closest ones to them. I always knew it was coming, and it did, you can’t avoid it, so we’re really, really grateful that we’re in close proximity to them for this reason, because that’s what family do. It’s tough.

The reasons for staying were health reasons, supporting family, supporting community, being close to my husband’s place of work so that we could maintain an income stream and be independent and financially able to cope with what was going on. Every agency we were dealing with in those early years was making it really difficult for us to maintain those core essential things that we needed to survive and that we valued as part of what it means for us. Am I saying that properly? To be a part of family and to be in a community with those around us and to have support from others and to give support − that’s part of our physical and mental and emotional wellbeing.

I’m so glad we’re still here and that we have the chance to care for my parents. They’re on the green side of the street.

Martin They have the opposite problem. For them, all the other things have been removed. They’re grieving the loss of their neighbours.

Anne The people who would have been dropping in to see how they were doing after 45 years of living there.

The red zoning decision

Martin I heard that we were red zoned when I was at school. A colleague of mine looked up on the computer where the red zone was and she came and said to me, “Do you know that your house is red zoned?” And I was absolutely … I couldn’t believe it. I could not believe that we were in the red zone. I thought there must be a huge mistake, because we had very little damage and we are far away from the river. And then when I looked … We didn’t know that this would lead to an uphill battle about everything that you normally expect. We found out online, it was a public thing that you could look up on a map whether you were red zoned or not, and then a letter came, I think, later on.

Anne We were both utterly intimidated by the initial processes around the red zoning, the way it was voluntary yet the pressures were immense from CERA to take their offer. Any processes for appeal were farcical, yet we had faith in those processes. It was emotionally, mentally and psychologically damaging to come to the realisation that, although we went through these processes with hope, genuine hope, the outcome was never going to be a sincere one. So the hope that there would be community consultation, the belief that there would be a political process, a democratic political process, especially around home and property rights, that’s one of our fundamental rights. It’s a key thing that someone has the right to be housed and homed. And that displacement will have − and has had − huge psychological, mental, physical repercussions on those it was forced upon. Many were overwhelmed and intimidated, and they left because of the threats of cutting services and loss of equity and ability to care for themselves in their old age. It was deeply traumatising.

Martin It has taken a heavy toll on us in terms of trust. Sometimes we are very depressed about our situation.

Anne I think it’s just a combination. It’s been a very hard year. Martin’s mum died, my parents are both in and out of hospital and unwell, our own health problems − there’s a multitude of things that are coming together that you’re dealing with normally, and then your resilience is eroded. And that was the case for us. And it’s fair to say that we’ve both been depressed. It’s just that grinding day-to-day getting through the days and the loss of wellbeing, the loss of joy of life, quality of life. It’s affected us in those ways.

Martin Anne’s health condition has resulted in lots of migraines or sleeplessness, or other stresses that were a burden on us and our situation, and then this has come on top of it.

Anne I have lost faith in supposed political processes. Before the red zoning I had a belief that I lived in a society where we had rights, and that those rights would be legally upheld and dealt with in due process, and that they would be dealt with in consultation with those whose rights had been affected. I no longer have that faith. I would go so far as to say that I am afraid of how decisions are really made.

Martin The red zoning was for us a very questionable thing, because at the end we found out that they didn’t want to reverse our zoning because it was inconvenient not to follow the street line and we were on the wrong side of the road. I don’t want to go zig zag was the official version. I have to follow the street line. And we thought, is that the only reason we are put through so much?

And then we thought, oh we don’t get mail anymore? Because we are red zoned. So for a couple of days we struggled even getting mail because it was said that people in the red zone could not get mail because it was not feasible. And it was the funniest thing, because after a couple of days when we said we’ve got a perfect road next to the house so it’s no problem, we’re not in the middle of nowhere, and they said, yeah, you can have mail, you are an exception.

And we had to fight to get our sewer connected because we lost the right to have a sewer through the red zoning. They put the new sewer out there through the street, dug it all up, it was just next to the old pipe, they connected all the other ones. And I said, we just need a plastic bit that’s 3 metres long to put in. It’s all dug up. And then you can connect us to the new sewer. And the response was, but you’re not going to be connected because you are red zoned. And I said, so if we stay, will you dig up the street afterwards with the new tar seal and put it in again if it has been established that we will be able to stay? All we need is a plastic pipe that long, and later on if the house really has to go you can cap it, it’s no problem and it doesn’t cost any more.

Anne It’s symbolism. The houses across the road are worth $300,000 more.

Martin We had one of the lowest damages in Christchurch, somebody told us − EQC [Earthquake Commission] value based on the amount of damage − and in the end we were told, for your own safety and for whatever, you have to get out of there. We did have liquefaction every time, two or three times, and we removed that, but otherwise we didn’t really feel more problems than on the other side of the road, which is green zoned. And that was always odd for us, and I felt punished by the fact that we didn’t exactly fit the model they had designed.

And our situation was so odd that we were left with a very low rating value. It was $90,000 for the house and for the land it was $150,000. We were intimidated. We heard if you don’t take this voluntary offer then it’s going to be very hard for you − you might get an offer after that that’s even worse. We were feeling that we had to do something and had to find a home. So we looked on open days, but we couldn’t find anything we trusted given Anne’s health situation, so I always hoped that somebody would come and say, this is an odd case, we have to debate this.

We tried to have a review of our red zoning, but it came to nothing. When the review answer came telling us you are still red zoned, you cannot rebuild your house where you are, we thought they must not have even looked at our case because we didn’t have to rebuild our house, so why do they tell us? So it was just a very general letter, nothing else. And the whole situation always looked odd to me, because we were in that L shape where we were on two sides surrounded by the green zone. For me personally it was the uncertainty of it all. What would happen? What would our property be worth? And then we got a new rating value which told us that our house and our property were now rated at $33,000 and we couldn’t do anything. Again you can ask for a review. We asked for a review, but it came to nothing again.

Anne In no way could they explain the logic to us of why they devalued our house by $300,000 when they said it was land that they were talking about. Our house hasn’t changed at all.

Sense of powerlessness

Martin We felt we were disowned on paper. Because they couldn’t kick us out of our property they had to disown us by the valuation of our property, and we felt that we couldn’t do anything about all these decisions that were made.

Anne Always powerless.

Martin This powerlessness to CERA’s red zoning, powerlessness to readdress the rating value, powerlessness when they wanted to take all the services away because we were red zoned. Why should we have water and power? Where was the Council? And then there was a powerlessness because they could not insure us anymore because we were red zoned.

All these were decisions made about us as a consequence of the red zoning. But how can you can be in a situation where the bureaucracy makes decisions you have no power to challenge? You try to but you feel not heard. All this sets off an avalanche of things, other problems kicking in.