A suburb in flux
Kris Ah Ta moved to Onehunga in 1997, a couple of years after the Dress-Smart mall opened. A single mum working as a teacher aide with three little girls, she felt Onehunga had everything she needed — lots of public transport options (so it didn’t matter if she didn’t have a car), amenities such as libraries, banks and supermarkets, schools all the way from new entrants to college and, perhaps most important of all, a real sense of home. “We felt safe, we built a community,” she says. “The kids were in and out of each other’s homes.”
Ah Ta is 52 but looks younger, her face smooth and lightly freckled, a few streaks of white in her curly black hair. She speaks with a teacher’s authoritative air: she’s not happy with the number of 1,2,3 Dollar Shops lining Onehunga Mall, many of which are in shopfronts retaining their original facades. The “huge draw” of Dress-Smart is wasted without better, more unique places to visit on the main drag, she says. She loves that her daughters still say hi to “Papa Patel” at the corner dairy and she loves her neighbours, but she’s displeased with new housing developments in the suburb, which to her seem to be pushing out families and changing the very character of Onehunga that first drew her in.
Onehunga, one of Auckland’s oldest suburbs, is undergoing a period of regeneration. Panuku, the development arm of Auckland Council, has been carrying out projects over the past three years, including a $30 million investment to improve the Taumanu Reserve down by the water and $1.2 million to upgrade Onehunga Mall. In many ways this is welcome —who doesn't want their home to grow and improve? But Onehunga has firm working-class roots and a longstanding ethnic diversity, and there is some suspicion among residents about how the developments might alter the fabric of the tight-knit community.
Over the fence from the Church St home Ah Ta lives in with all three of her now-grown daughters (they’ve only moved once in the past 22 years)
