Photo: Getty Images Granny pods are trending, those wee granny flats I mean and having a miniature home tucked down the back of your section has never been easier to do. You don’t need a consent to build a dwelling under 70sq m, but you do need a registered builder to sign it off, so you do need a consent, just a different kind. With it being so easy to throw up a tiny accommodation, why then, are more than 70 grannies homeless at the moment in Whangārei?* The solution seems simple — build a granny pod and let a homeless granny live there. Homelessness among older people in New Zealand has escalated to crisis levels. Rising living costs, falling homeownership rates and a severe shortage of affordable rentals is forcing retirees out onto the streets, so there are plenty of opportunities to grab a granny and install her down the garden for a while. She doesn’t have to be related to you — that’s half the charm and a quarter the bother. The playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett let a homeless woman called Margaret Fairchild (otherwise known as Miss Shepherd) live in a battered Bedford van in the driveway of his London town house for 15 years. He didn’t intend to, but she was causing a ruckus on the street and he was trying to concentrate. "She was there in full view of my window while I was working," Bennett says. "She used to get pestered by people. I used to go out and tell them to clear off. This distracted me from my work and it gradually got to the point where the only way to break through the situation was to invite her [in 1974] into the drive, where no-one else would bother her." Bennett thought she’d stay for three months. She ended up occupying his driveway for over a decade until her death in 1989. "She was very strong-willed," Bennett says. "She made no attempt to go, and I’m quite lazy. It was easier to leave her where she was." Had he known she would stay so long, he never would have made the offer — especially considering Miss Shepherd’s charmless personality. She was difficult to like, never smiled, had no sense of humour, and her politics were very different. But your own family can be unbelievably crap, so why not pour some love into someone more deserving? What do you get in return? First of all, old people are excellent at ye old skills such as gardening, knitting and cooking things in fat. They make good guard dogs because they are so nosey. They love a natter so they can talk to any doorsteppers who rock up asking if you’re acquainted with Jesus. If you are the incel type that women won’t date, housing a granny will make the ladies less likely to do the vomit hand signal at you. If they are really eccentric, you can’t help but appear exotic by association, unless they have a touch of the pyromaniac, in which case say goodbye to your eyebrows. Of course, the real reason I’m trying to socialise this idea is that there’s every chance I will be homeless by 65, as I have no savings and no back-up plan, so if housing grannies has become trendy by then ("Oh I found ours in the botanic garden, she’s hilarious and ever so good at keeping the birds off the strawberries") I might find myself cutting an antic caper among the runner bean rows of a random stranger. Not to put you off but there’s also every chance this very social housing initiative could backfire spectacularly and your granny might be a racist ol’ scumbag, or simply never leave and just rot into the lawn like that caravan in Aramoana — but that’s old people for you, happens to the best of us. *According to the latest official count, 237 people are living rough in Whangārei, sleeping in tents, in cars or on the street. Of those, 75 are aged 65 or older.
