Porirua East state houses

A view over Porirua East, showing a mixture of single and multi-unit state houses constructed in the 1950s and '60s. Within a couple of decades, however, the suburb had attracted an unwelcome and, according to many residents, undeserved reputation for high rates of poverty and crime. Critics attributed eastern Porirua's problems to the lack of social infrastructure, uniformity of housing design and concentration of low-income households.