We Call it Home

Aimed at the general reader and highly illustrated, this is a history of state housing with a difference -- re-telling the experiences of the designers, tenants and occupiers of New Zealand state houses from 1940s to the present. Among hundreds of interviews the author discovers stories from some of the remotest parts of the West Coast, from state house kids growing up in 1950s Taumaranui and city-centres through to Middle Eastern migrants living in Mt Roskill in the 1990s. These human stories challenge many stereotyped views surrounding state housing, and critically examines popular ideas that tenants are bludgers or trouble-makers or that state houses are failed experiments in social engineering.