New grants scheme for character-home improvements
 To encourage owners to hold onto and maintain character homes in the city, the City Council has begun a grants scheme which will be administered by community boards.
The idea was first mooted in 2004 in response to concerns that particularly the larger, timber homes with expressive architectural style were being lost and replaced by new, higher-density residential units. As a result, the city was losing the quality of local streetscapes, neighbourhoods, open spaces, settings and trees. At that time, the Council instructed staff to look at what might be done to encourage owners to hold onto these homes.
Last month, the Council approved a four-year, $75,000-a-year fund. The grants, of up to $5000 a property, are intended to provide a small financial contribution towards the external upgrading and maintenance of individual family homes which have, "a distinctive visual character and make a key contribution to the quality of the local streetscape and the community identity".
City Councillor Anna Crighton is very pleased the scheme is now in place. "The Council sees this as an incentive for owners of those homes to keep them," she says. "We know they're harder to keep up and that there's pressure to use the land in another way, but we'd all be the poorer if that happened everywhere in the city.
"The character of our suburbs is being eroded with new development resulting in the loss of good character housing stock," she says. "These grants can go towards essential maintenance like roof repairs and things like painting."
The Council will advertise the scheme in July or August, calling for applications. These will be sent on to the appropriate community board for consideration.
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