Bleak City (15 page)

After the February earthquake, the people of Christchurch adapted to living with a city that had a red zone, that part of the inner city that was cordoned off and guarded by the army because it was too dangerous for people to go in there without a good reason. Then, in June 2011, the Government announced a new red zone, the residential red zone. This was land that was so badly damaged that the Government said it was uneconomic to repair. It could be repaired, but to do so would be so astronomically expensive and would take so long that residents’ lives would be disrupted for at least seven years, if not more.

Instead, the Government would buy the damaged land and owners could either sell their house to the Government or negotiate a settlement with their private insurance company. Once the red zone offers were accepted, all those houses would be cleared, those neighbourhoods would disappear, their people dispersed to other parts of Christchurch, or even further afield.

Alice’s uncle Jason’s house had been red zoned. He and Carla had planned on raising a family in that house and now the neighbourhood they had chosen for their future family was just going to disappear.

Despite the emotional impact, the residential red zone announcement seemed like good news, it would mean that people had a way out financially and they didn’t have to wait years for their land to be fixed up. They could move on, go and live somewhere else. Some were unhappy that the settlement value used would be the 2007 rating valuations. It was four years later, and the New Zealand property market was growing quickly, so how could a 2007 value paid out in 2011 possibly be fair? Many New Zealanders rely on capital gains from property sales to increase their personal wealth, so the idea of foregoing four years of potential capital gains by accepting the Government offer was not a palatable one. If a homeowner had made expensive improvements to the property and could not prove those costs through building consents or receipts for work carried out, they stood to lose a good deal of money.

Then there was the actual value of people’s insurance policies. A full replacement policy would give the homeowner the opportunity to buy a new section and build an equivalent house, but taking the red zone offer would not give many people enough money to put them back in an equivalent property. The Prime Minister had said, in making the red zone announcements, that the Government was committed to getting things right for people, but how could things be right if people were being offered less than the value of their homes?

Jason and Carla were over for dinner. They had come in the afternoon and watched a movie with Olivia and Jack, who had since gone to bed after having their dinner, what little Lindsay could get them to eat of the chicken and vegetables Alice had roasted.

Jason and Carla were still living with Carla’s mother in the north of the city and hadn’t decided what to do. Their red zone offer wouldn’t give them enough for a house the same size unless they went out of the city, as far as Rangiora or Kaiapoi, over twenty kilometres north. But they had to decide soon if they were going out there, Jason said, property prices were skyrocketing with the all the red zoners looking for something to buy. Some red zoners wanted to stay where they were, while some wanted to get as far away from the quakes as they could. If Jason and Carla wanted to stay in the city, they would have to buy a smaller place or take out a bigger mortgage. Neither was a palatable option if they were going to have children any time soon. They were talking about Rangiora or Kaiapoi, but neither of them seemed convinced.

‘I would miss the hills,’ Carla said. ‘And the rivers.’

Their families were in town and they didn’t want to be away from everyone. If they had kids, they wanted those kids to grow up near their grandparents, not a forty-five minute drive away.

‘Is your mum staying?’ Alice asked. She hadn’t seen them since soon after the February quake, when she had helped Jason dig out all the silt that had come up around his mother-in-law’s house. She wasn’t too happy about the idea of staying at the time.

Carla nodded. ‘The house can be fixed, and Mum doesn’t want to leave her garden. And it’s where Dad lived.’ Carla’s eyes teared up.

Alice got up from the table and went out to the kitchen to get dessert while the others cleared the table.

Carla’s father had died a few years before the quakes started, but for some reason the quakes had sharpened her grief rather than distracting her from it. Alice and Lindsay had talked about that, how her dad’s absence was getting harder for her, not easier, and Alice knew Lindsay thought less of Carla for it. But wouldn’t the father you loved be even more missed during the difficult times? In the months since the February quake, especially, Alice had spent more time thinking about her family than she ever had before, thinking about how things worked in her family, on all sides of it. Maybe if Carla’s father were still alive, she would talk to him about where she and Jason would move to, maybe not having him to run ideas past was part of her inability to make a decision one way or another? She understood Carla’s exhaustion.

‘It’s going to snow tonight,’ Lindsay said as they started eating dessert.

‘I would miss the opportunity to see snow on the hills,’ Carla said. ‘I don’t want to be away from the hills.’

If their where-to-live problem seemed difficult, it looked simple when compared to the situation one of their neighbours found themselves in. Jason said the guy had decided to take the Government offer on the land and negotiate with his insurance company over the house. But when he contacted the insurance company, they said his house was repairable and they were going to pay him out on that basis.

‘How’s that possible?’ Kevin said. ‘The land is going to be cleared.’

‘Exactly,’ Jason said. ‘But the insurance company said it’s not their problem, the house can be repaired so they’ll pay out as much as it costs them to repair it, no more.’

‘That seems cruel,’ Alice said, and everyone nodded. ‘It can’t be legal.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it is,’ Lindsay said. ‘There’s something in policies about government destruction not being covered and this would probably qualify.’

Another family, Carla said, were in the same boat, only their insurance company had already told them, before the February quake, that their house was a rebuild. Once the red zoning was announced, they had changed their mind. It was now a repair and the payout was going to be much smaller.

‘That’s dodgy,’ Kevin said. ‘There’s no way something written off by one quake is suddenly fixed up by another one.’

Jason shrugged. ‘Who knows, maybe if these quakes go on for long enough, everyone’s houses will magically jiggle back into shape? Yeah, right.’

‘At least they have an offer,’ Lindsay said. ‘Have you talked to Mum and Dad?’

‘About the section?’ Jason said. ‘No, have they heard something?’

Neil and Heather had a section in the Heathcote Valley, near the epicentre of the February quake. They had been planning to build a new home on it, where they would spend their retirement. The plans were drawn up and they had been talking to builders, but since the September quake, everything had been on hold. There had been rockfalls on the hills in the February quake and, as a result, quite a bit of land had been white zoned, meaning it could end up red zoned, including Neil and Heather’s section.

‘Nothing,’ Lindsay said. ‘But they were talking to someone else who has a section up there and they reckoned there wouldn’t be an offer. No insurance means no EQC cover, which means no offer.’

‘You don’t know that, Lin,’ Kevin said. ‘The guy was just speculating, they could still get an offer. And they still don’t know that they’ll be red zoned, it could go green.’

‘But when the offers were announced, how Brownlee talked about them wasn’t promising,’ Alice said. Gerry Brownlee was the Minister for Earthquake Recovery, in charge of CERA and, therefore, the one heading up the land zoning decisions. ‘He said the Government’s first priority was helping people who had helped themselves by getting insurance. That’s not the way you talk about people you think should get compensation. I don’t think they’ll be offered anything, given that attitude.’

‘Why didn’t they have insurance?’ Carla said, looking confused.

‘Can’t insure bare land,’ Kevin said. ‘So what Gerry said was a bit cruel, really, considering there was no way they could get insurance and now the Government’s taking their land.’

‘That sucks,’ Jason said.

‘Yup,’ Lindsay said. Everyone was nodding.

‘And it kind of makes Brownlee’s attitude a bit disingenuous,’ Alice said.

‘In what way?’ Lindsay said.

‘Well surely he knows you can’t insure bare land,’ Alice said.

‘You would hope the Minister for Earthquake Recovery would know that,’ Kevin said.

‘Right,’ Alice continued. ‘So why’s he say it unless he’s being deliberately manipulative, laying the groundwork for the day when it’s clear that no offers are going to be made on empty land?’

‘Him saying that now won’t make the landowners any happier later, when they don’t get offered anything for land they can’t do anything with,’ Lindsay said. ‘Mum and Dad certainly wouldn’t be happy.’

‘No, not for them,’ Alice said. ‘But for everyone else. Because if he paints them to the public as irresponsible, then they won’t have public support. If they have to go to court.’

They all stared at her. Alice wondered if she should have kept her thoughts to herself, that maybe she was reading things the wrong way.

Jason said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was possible in New Zealand three months ago, but hearing what our neighbour’s insurance company told him, I’m starting to think it’s realistic.’

When Jason and Carla were leaving, it was starting to snow, big flakes turning the ground white. Alice and Lindsay stayed outside, sitting on the doorstep under the eaves, watching the snow fall, the ground getting whiter and whiter.

‘Livvy and Jack will love it in the morning,’ Lindsay said.

‘It’ll be their first real snow, won’t it?’ Alice said. ‘The last was the year before Jack was born, and Livvy’s too young to remember that.’ It was the first really big snow Alice could remember. There had been a big snow the year Alice was born. Lindsay had told her about the power being out and the stress of trying to keep tiny little Alice warm in the cold flat they were living in. It was one of the few times she talked about those years being married to Andrew.

Lindsay nodded. ‘Hopefully the power will stay on, but at least we have the fire back.’ The replacement fire had finally been installed a couple of days after the June quake, and Lindsay was relieved. No matter the state of the house, at least they would be able to curl up in front of the fire. If there were power cuts, they would be warm.

‘I wonder what the city will be like,’ Alice said. ‘If the snow settles, I might go in and see it.’

Lindsay looked at her, she seemed about to say something. Alice knew Lindsay thought her city visits were an unhealthy obsession, but Alice saw it as better than going in and being shocked at the drastic changes. This way she would get used to it, slowly. But in that moment, sitting on the steps, Lindsay was oddly self-controlled about expressing her opinions on Alice’s choices lately. For one thing, she hadn’t said a word about Alice not seeking something more than the coffee shop job. She seemed to appreciate Alice’s help around the house, but never said anything to confirm Alice’s suspicions.

‘Let’s go inside,’ Lindsay said. ‘I’ll make you a hot chocolate.’

They sat in the kitchen sipping their hot chocolates, watching the snow falling in the backyard, increasingly steady. The cat dashed in through the cat flap, trying to shake the cold off his paws. They laughed. He looked so indignant.

In the morning, the city was covered in a blanket of snow.
The Press
website put up pictures of the city, broken buildings draped in snow. It looked pretty rather than sad for a change, and it wasn’t long before someone on Facebook was passing around a snow-related meme: The snow is the icing on the quake.

For Kevin and Lindsay, though, the extra weight of the snow on the roof showed up problems with the house. The roof was leaking in four places and Kevin spent the morning in the roof space checking what tiles were broken and putting plastic sheeting up to stop the water from coming through. They would need to get a roofer to look at it, he said, once the snow had gone.

‘Get onto EQC?’ Lindsay said.

‘Only if you want it done in about a decade,’ Kevin said.

After helping Kevin with the roof, Alice wrapped up warm and told Lindsay she was going to see Sonya. She packed half a dozen of the cheese scones she had made that morning into a plastic container and stuffed the container into a plastic bag in case it started to snow again.

Sonya was Lindsay and Jason’s sister, the typical resentful middle child. Although she had been having more contact with the family since the quakes started, something had gone wrong a couple of months ago and no one was talking to her. Or she wasn’t talking to anyone, it was hard to tell which way it was. Alice tried her best to stay out of whatever it was, to stay in touch with Sonya, not because she particularly liked Sonya, because she didn’t really, but she wanted to keep in touch with her cousins, Cody and Ella. They were eleven and eight, a little bit older than Olivia and Jack.

As comfortable as Alice was driving on the city’s cracked and slumping roads, she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of driving on snow and ice so decided to walk to Sonya’s. It was two kilometres away but it took about twice as long as usual walking on the soft snow.

The power was out at Sonya’s, and she was slow to answer the door, wrapped in a polar fleece blanket, wearing track pants and thick socks.

Sonya usually kept a tidy house, but over winter she seemed to be losing the plot a bit. Twice Alice had been around and found all the dishes dirty, piled into and around the sink, none of the clothes washed, the house dusty. The quakes were getting to everyone in different ways and with Sonya it seemed to be the erosion of her normally good household habits. Each time, Alice had helped her get everything back under control and then Sonya would cope fine for a few weeks before losing control again. As she followed Sonya down the hall into the lounge, Alice could see that the deterioration was starting once again. The washing basket in Sonya’s bedroom was overflowing with clothes and towels, and more towels lay piled on the bathroom floor.