In a pretty lakeside village, on the northern tip of the mighty Alpine Fault, the rumblings of a quiet war have been waged over a housing development. The fight over the Beechnest subdivision in St Arnaud, the gateway town to the Nelson Lakes National Park, has caused a seismic rift in the neighbourhood that some say may never be healed. At the heart of the matter were two sites within an existing subdivision, each destined to have only one home which suddenly had the potential to have 10 "Coronation Street-style" homes cheek by jowl.
The locals who bought into the area on the boundary of the park for the pristine, and sometimes wild, alpine environment were upset at the thought of losing the reason they lived there. Today, the developers are still wondering what went wrong, while those on the other side are counting the cost of being called into battle to protect their existing property rights. It's taken hearings in the District Court and the High Court, plus a crack at an appeal in the Court of Appeal for the developer Beechnest (2014) Ltd to land back where it started.
"We didn't want to go to court - we tried hard not to but we had no choice. We were taken to court, to maintain the status quo," says opponent and St Arnaud property owner Gisela Purcell. She and her partner Wayne Pool stood to be among those most affected by plans to further subdivide two large lots within an existing subdivision, to make way for higher-density housing.
Purcell, who works in the field of s.