Wellington’s woes make headlines, but do the anecdotes fit the facts?

When John Key casually claimed Wellington was dying 10 years ago, a media-led backlash prompted the PM to take it back. Now, ministers are trying to accentuate the positive – and the media are asking if the capital’s best days are behind it.

“No, it’s not [dying]. There is so much entrepreneurship and excitement in Wellington. We have vibrant exciting businesses and they are Wellington’s future,” finance minister Nicola Willis told RNZ last Wednesday.

Some listeners were not convinced.

“I walked around the city on Monday afternoon and it was like a ghost town. It’s been wiped out. And I don’t think the government can pretend that’s not the case,” one said by text.

“The only vibrancy in Wellington is from the wind,” another said.

The comments were prompted by a report on the latest business closures in the CBD, which said 50 shops on the city’s so-called Golden Mile that were currently vacant.

“Wellington doesn’t know how lucky it is,” another Morning Report listener said by text, pointing out there were other places around the country “also feeling a bit desolate at the moment”.

One was Raetihi, from where RNZ’s Alexa Cook posted a stark report featuring some of those who had lost jobs at the two nearby mills set to close.

Do anecdotes fit the facts?

In The New Zealand Herald the same morning – under the headline ‘Is Wellington dying or just feeling sorry for itself?’ – Thomas Coughlan pointed out that solid economic evidence of the impact of government belt-tightening and public sector job-cutting in Wellington would not be available for months.

“Much of the reporting on the city’s problems has been necessarily anecdotal.”

And the commentary too, he could have added.

“In the hospo scene, people come and go. Always have. The names have been around, survived a lot, seen hard times, and yet this time they can’t do it. What’s that tell you about how badly this place has been wrecked?” Mike Hosking asked rhetorically on his ZB Breakfast show last Monday.

He was reacting to the news that bakery cafe Pandoro would close in the capital after 28 years.

A note in the store window from director Tony Beazley said it had just become too tough to keep its three bakeries open.

“The economic downturn, customers working from home, the redundancies in the public sector, cycle lanes and the Wellington City Council are all contributors,” it said.

But – as RNZ’s report noted – none of the cafes were on roads with cycle lanes. And The Spinoff’s Wellington editor Joel McManus pointed out that the use of each one of the nearest cycleways has gone up markedly, bringing more people into the CBD.

The 6500 public service job cuts is likely to be a bigger problem for CBD businesses.

The Herald‘s Thomas Coughlan cited data showing Wellington is actually one of the more productive regions in New Zealand, in spite if what gets called “bashing from the right which labels the public service as inefficient”.

Shooting the messenger?

“The capital feels like it’s gradually hollowing out,” editor Tracy Watkins wrote in the Sunday Star-Times last weekend.

She cited working from home, the cost of living, car parking and the disruption of council projects and roadworks, as well as public service cuts, “coupled with a massive infrastructure deficit, big rates rises – and the punishing costs of earthquake strengthening”, she added.

“The usual cheerleaders will come out and accuse me of being overly negative,” she said.

One week earlier, she was also telling readers “some people will blame the media” for the capital’s woes.

“But the capital isn’t in a slump because it was on our front page; and things won’t get better if we just stop talking about it.

“But we deserve to cop some criticism,” she added.

“Do we dwell on the negatives too much? Maybe we should be more critical before applying the word ‘crisis’ to any situation.

“Maybe we should do a better job of talking about how we can use our voice to be part of the solution, rather than the problem.”

Watkins also edits Stuff’s Wellington daily The Post, which is now trying to do that.

The day the Pandoro cafes closed, the front page trumpeted “ideas that might improve the ailing capital, if we’re bold enough”.

Last Monday, The Post‘s front page showed the Wellington waterfront on one of its “unbeatable” good days. Inside, it published readers’ ideas for “how to snap the city out of its funk”.

(Some were not likely to get on the council agenda, though – such as a floating cycleway that crosses the water from Evans Bay to the Miramar peninsula.)

Mixed messages

Elsewhere in The Post that day, there was news another cycleway had been paused by the council – and news of another cost increase in the shared seawall path between Ngauranga and Petone.

There was good news: the 80 council’s shoulder-high roadside solar panels are still working. But the bad news was they’d all been smashed by vandals.

Meanwhile, the Stuff website reported a once-bustling central Wellington street was facing “a death knell”, according to Retail NZ.

Cutting across The Post‘s focus on solutions, Stuff’s story asked online readers: What’s Wellington’s biggest problem?

It offered them a smorgasbord including the global economy, carparks, public transport and failing water pipes.

(For the record, the Wellington City Council topped that poll, and 15 percent of readers reckoned the cycleways were the biggest problem.

‘A Capital Conversation’

This weekend, The Post stepped up its efforts to constructively address what it had tagged six months ago ‘The Capital Crisis’.

“It’s time to see what’s improved and what still needs urgent attention. And champion what’s great about Wellington,” Watkins said, launching A Capital Conversation.

It kicked off with a spotlight on the Golden Mile, other empty sites and buildings, and the past and present of hospo and retail.

It promised more to come – including coverage of why parking and cycle lanes have become so divisive.

(Although one reason for that is opinion pieces like one in The Post last week calling cyclists “the new elite”, which claimed some ride bikes worth $10,000 – a bit rich for the lowest cost form of transport apart from walking).

The Weekend Post featured a utopian letter from the future by marketer Helen Milner – all about life in sustainable Wellington in 2040 when everything is all fixed and the Phoenix fill the stadium every week.

But below that on the page was a written warning form veteran former MP and minister Peter Dunne, saying “mood-lifting frothy newspaper articles” would not do the trick.

Not all doom and gloom

Last month, The Post reported the mall in Naenae in the Hutt Valley was moribund – and Johnsonville Mall was “desolate and in despair”.

It was a bit of a change of tone last weekend when Stuff‘s new hire Patrick Gower went to Manurewa’s SouthMall and found it bustling.

He credited SouthMall’s owner Neil Punja, but his four-minute video and a brief story on the Stuff website didn’t really say how he did it.

There was a lot of detail though in a long, illustrated piece for TVNZ’s 1News this week asking: Are New Zealand’s biggest cities becoming boring backwaters?

Not according to its author Julie Hill, who reckoned they’re not dying – but changing.

Auckland downtown was heaving if you looked in the right places at the right times, she said.

A quality of life survey gave Christchurch top points for work/life balance, and a third thought the city had improved in the past year,

And a Gen-X Wellingtonian living downtown told her events there were still pulling lively crowds – and if it seemed a bit grim right now, that was because it had been winter. “Scarf up” and wait for better days, he advised.

Another Wellington veteran has been tracking the doom and gloom reports from afar in recent months.

“Is anyone more irritating than someone who returns from a long holiday to tell everyone: ‘For God’s sake, cheer up!’? Well, that’s me,” said Pattrick Smellie, founder and editor of BusinessDesk.

He said he’d found similar problems in eight European countries he’d just visited, but not “a chorus of angst that the country seemed to be failing – or the word ‘crisis’ being used to describe almost anything”.

On economic output per head of population, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic and France had lower annual economic output per head of population than New Zealand, he said.

“New Zealand is less like a poor country without a future and more like a rich country that’s often been poorly run.”

Every country he went to – including the US – also had plenty of neglected roads and many have “crappy water infrastructure”, he said.

But most cities of more than a million had cheap and good public transport.

“Like it or not, cycling is part of the future. Get over it.”

Easier said than done here in New Zealand right now.

This week, freshly released data from the New Zealand Election Study, conducted after the 2023 election, showed New Zealanders were evenly split on their support for cycleways.

But when political affiliations were taken into account, they were poles apart.

The more left wing the party, the greater the support – the stronger they leaned to the right, the stronger the depth of opposition.

For that reason alone, we may get more about that in our news than our cities’ bigger problems.