Craig Turner says the family-owned business has been unable to grow as it wanted because of space constraints in Auckland. Director Craig Turner said the fourth-generation family-owned business had been unable to grow as it wanted because of space constraints in Auckland. But building a new manufacturing base is only part of the story behind the staged development, which still requires Environment Court approval for a significant zoning change. For many of the people that work for us, housing is not affordable - certainly not in Auckland," Turner told The New Zealand Herald.
Currently, that is incredibly hard to do if not impossible. The new estate will ultimately host a 66ha industrial hub, 33ha of new housing and 60ha of public open space. The Sleepyhead Estate will not be a dormitory suburb of Auckland, requiring residents to drive to shopping and community facilities.
These will be incorporated in the new community. We expect lots of others to show and interest and join us," Turner said. That money can go into buying their homes and things they really want to have. Target business occupants include factory outlets. Turner said the project hopes to attract "some of the big names of Europe". Some of the company's suppliers were likely to follow it south. The first stage will be the construction of a facility for the foam manufacturing and underlay division, due for completion by the end of next year.
The site, 40 minutes south of Comfort Group's Otahuhu headquarters, is beside the new Waikato Expressway and a rail siding will be built to transport the company's imported and exported products to and from the ports of Tauranga and Auckland.
The company's exit from Auckland will be staged over several years. In the meantime, the company will subsidise the travel costs of Auckland resident staff who will work at Ohinewai.
Turner said some staff were already driving to Auckland from Hamilton and Huntly and many lived south of the company's current sites and were already spending up to 40 minutes driving to work each day. At dusk at Lakeview, it's quiet, far too quiet. A lone couple takes an evening stroll up the road. In half an hour, just two cars pass. The pavements are pristine, the lawns are mowed. There are fenced off building sites, but few diggers.
Any construction workers that may have been there have now gone. Rimmington warns of the lessons for Sleepyhead Estate at the south end of the lake.
And where they're building is low-lying on a flood plain There is a stark divide between the position of Waikato District mayor Allan Sanson, who is excited about the social and economic potential of the development for Ohinewai and Huntly, and Waikato Regional Council, which worries about the impact on the environment, and the water and transport infrastructure.
But why have a district plan, consult with the public, then grant a private application to put this thing on a the side of a motorway? We are reliant on rural land, no two ways about it. We don't want this kind of development, that's not what Waikato wants.
Why not put the money into Huntly or Te Kauwhata? I've been a landlord for 30 years and yes, there is a shortage of housing right through, but ad hoc building on a motorway is not the way to solve that problem.
For now, Ohinewai remains a rural idyll, a horse grazing over a wooden fence here, rabbits dashing across the road there, a stark contrast to the small beige and white houses on their neatly trimmed patches of lawn in Lakeside.
Ohinewai Rd, where Whyte lives, was once state highway 1, heading south through to Huntly. Now, the road narrows as you drive south past the village; wild grass and thick brush spills out onto the asphalt until the road comes to an end entirely, beneath the embankment of an expressway onramp. There are those like Malcolm Lumsden who say they rarely go into Huntly now; he takes the expressway straight through to The Base in Hamilton to do his shopping.
Others like David Whyte see the Ohinewai and Huntly communities as deeply intertwined. Whyte, a former research scientist, and his wife live on a five hectare lifestyle block; she goes into town to work; he grows organic fruit that he delivers an hour up the expressway to Mt Wellington every Tuesday.
We stroll the boundary, and Whyte plucks me a small, sweet apple, and a plum each for my three sons. Huntly is a low socio-economic area so it has all the ills associated with lack of employment, he explains. The development is projected to bring about jobs to the areas — the factory, plus all the ancillary jobs like the petrol station and other light industrial businesses. So there are no holidays, they struggle for uniforms for kids for school, anything apart from basically staying alive.
And how can we, as company owners, change this situation? So they want their employees to own homes, and there is no way their employees can own homes in Auckland. We have no space for development in Huntly. From a Huntly perspective, a new satellite community whose residents drive the five kilometres into town to do their grocery shopping, and join the sports clubs, and go to church — that seems ideal.
Sitting at his dining table, Whyte contemplatively turns over in his hands the strewn pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle, bought from a local op shop. A cross hangs on the wall; his parents were missionaries in Africa. Now, he's not wearing a hat. I'd prefer people to be in a home.
So I'm fairly pro-development. I get in my car and take the expressway into Huntly, along the once-familiar road overlooking the broad brown river and the twin-stacked power station, past the railway crossing and underneath the faded old DEKA sign. It's six o'clock in the evening and the main street is fairly busy. There are plenty of people in and out of the takeaway joints and pubs.
At the McDonald's on the old state highway, year-old Mary-Jane Tarver and her boyfriend Judas Williams are ordering their burgers and chips, to go. Mary-Jane has lived her all her life, and she loves it. A couple of service stations and fast food chain restaurants like the McDonald's are feeling the pinch, she acknowledges, but on the most part she thinks business hasn't been adversely affected by the loss of through-traffic. Indeed, the reduced traffic makes the streets safer and cleaner.
She would happily bid farewell to the through-traffic, and instead welcome new community members living and working at Ohinewai.
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Tracy Neal looks at how the Marlborough settlement is using what happened to save itself from oblivion. Dummy text. Contribute to Newsroom and support quality NZ journalism Become a supporter. Jonathan Milne. The Waikato's safety valve Malcolm Lumsden in a homemade canoe, playing with his younger brothers Kerren and Ralph.
Photo: Supplied Malcolm Lumsden has a photo of himself in a homemade canoe, playing with his younger brothers Kerren and Ralph in the receding waters of the oft-remembered floods of February Malcolm Lumsden, 72, still farms dairy north of Ohinewai, though the heavy lifting is now done by his son and daughter-in-law.
Photo: Supplied Subsequent floods have been devastating, but the control scheme has saved people's homes. Keeping it in the family earns top award. Friday, 09 March Photo: Craig and Graeme Turner. Latest Issue.
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