Last year, Critic invited students to submit their pads or paddocks to win a free feed from Delivereasy. We went ‘round and toured the best and the worst of the lot, risking both our lungs and our livers to set things straight. Based exclusively on the flats that chose to enter, here are Dunedin’s 2022 Best and Worst Flat Awards.
Worst Flats:
Runner Up: Deathstar
Deathstar is infamous, and for good reason. The place absolutely fucking sucks. It’s a cement shoebox with smashed windows and mould on most surfaces, joined in the middle with the aptly-named Methstar. This place is awful.
The first thing you see when you approach Deathstar is the cement facade, which looks less like a flat for human beings and more like a Soviet-era zoo enclosure (this might not be an accident). The second thing you notice is the smattering of broken glass which, when we visited, was lovingly spread across the local mudpit. The pit (out front, where all good mudpits should be) was surrounded by couches and rubbish, and we were shown a video of someone belly-flopping into it. The pit is filled with broken glass and, surely, some gnarly bacteria. At least, it was - we’re pretty sure it was paved over this summer, entombed as it should’ve been years ago.
You then walk down the side of Deathstar to try to find the door, or what’s left of it. It’s a narrow squeeze down the alleyway, which the hosts told us they’d “actually just cleaned”. It was not clean.
First up was the kitchen which, to be honest, could’ve been a lot worse. The bench looks out into the living room so you can watch The Boys spin decks while you cook, and it has a great view of next door’s solid iron fence. The sink, of course, was filled with crook-ass dishes, including a nice colony of mould growing on spaghetti bolognese inside tupperware. Mycology students would’ve been impressed.
The hallway was as thin as the residents’ attention spans. There was a screw driven into the wall for no apparent reason, but that’s not too unheard of. The two toilets had a plaster wall between them, but that had long-since had a hole kicked through it to improve the feng-shui of the shitting situation “so the boys can talk to each other” while they do their business. Honestly this isn’t a bad idea.
Behind the flat is The Second Mudpit, which is not as bad as the first, though it is a different colour. Something green has seeped into the ground here, perhaps from the mattress left to decay in the yard. It looks like a biohazard.
All in all, this place is an absolute fucking shambles. It is disgusting, and it is everything you think of when you think of shitty Dunedin flats. However! It raises a critical point of difference: that between a shitty flat and shitty flatters. This flat is awful, yes. It is a cinderblock nightmare. It is not, however, entirely the flat’s fault. This is Dunedin’s Worst Flats, not Dunedin’s Worst Flatmates. And this is why Deathstar only netted second place.
Winner: 209 Leith
The first thing you need to know about 209 Leith is that it sat derelict for the last two years. It was literally so shit that nobody lived in it, even though Dunedin’s rental market is as cutthroat as ever. We don’t know if this is because it wasn’t advertised or whatever, but we’d like to think it’s because it’s Dunedin’s worst flat and even students stayed clear.
The second thing you need to know about 209 Leith is that it’s not the tenant’s fault. Not entirely, anyway. It’s an all-girls flat, so good on them for breaking stereotypes and proving that the ladies can be just as filthy as the blokes. But despite their relatively mid efforts to keep the place in one piece, 209 Leith is still doing its best to kill everyone inside it and within a four-metre radius.
The entire house is leaning. This isn’t particularly uncommon, unfortunately, but it is remarkable nonetheless. “Sometimes if I turn too much in the night I’ll fall off,” said one of our hostesses. A narrow, slanting hallway passes four bedrooms before dumping you unceremoniously into the kitchen, which shares a door with the flat’s only bathroom. The door doesn’t really work so it’s more of an “open concept” kitchen/toilet combo. The bathroom’s light also doesn’t work, so the girls resorted to showering in the dark or with a flashlight, and said that sometimes you’ll just have to sit on the toilet while someone else is washing. Oh, also, the ceiling in there was caked in black mould. “We cleaned it pretty recently though” the hosts said.
The very little space available in the hallway is occupied with a straw-laiden dog cage, “in case anyone gets too pissed”. Some of the door hinges in the flat are still attached to doors, many aren’t. Water drips down from the roof into strategically-placed buckets, a couple of which fill up “every few months”. The hallway wall sports at least one nice boot-kick hole, which the hosts suspect was home to a rat for a while. “We heard some rustling” they said. That hole backs into a room called The Shoebox, which is, unsurprisingly, fucking tiny.
Back in the kitchen, things were looking better. “You’ve actually caught us on a pretty good day today” they said, but didn’t know how long a tray of pasta on the bench had been there, and “I don’t wanna know”. Two “compost bins” filled up with eggs and avos overflow onto the microwave, but a bin out back is filling up with a genuinely decent compost pile.
The backyard is filled with broken glass, thrown over the fence by their neighbours who they described as “fucking pains in the ass”. Literally at that moment, we could hear glass bottles being hurled into the backyard. Aside from glass, it’s also host to the North D classics: the carcass of a wooden palette, and a rotting wood picnic table that looks like it can support about as much pressure as your average Master’s student.
The backyard is also host to “the water feature”, which started spurting water after the washing machine fucked out. When the toilet clogged, it spat out shit and toilet paper into the yard. “Literal human faeces” they said.
But then, in the kitchen, worst-flat kryptonite: a chore roster! Written in pink and yellow, with smiley faces and everything. Their claim to fame was in peril, until the host pointed out that the chores list was still on Week 1, and that “nobody has ever looked at it”. So it’s more of a decorative piece, like how you might keep a guitar around in case you ever want to learn to play. Someday, right?
All in all, this place was a genuine shithole. There aren’t many more words needed to describe it, just that it was so shit that it somehow sat empty for the last two years.
Best Flats:
Runner Up: Silver Fox
The girls living at the Silver Fox (38 Howe) have it pretty good. But, I’ll be honest, not a lot of people applied for “Best Flat in Dunedin”, which is quite telling.
That being said, that flat is solid for what it is. It came partially furnished and equipped with good indoor heating, and for four uni students the location is hard to beat. It’s got a more-than-decent area out back with easy access to neighbours and a spacious-enough interior that could easily accommodate a party or six.
The landlord is a particular selling point here, whom the flatmates described as “amazing” (with four !’s) and “always handy with issues”. They reported zero mould in the flat, which sounds impressive but realistically should be the norm. This is possibly due to the fact that the tenants are quite tidy, but as we’ve seen with some other flats in the area, even the tidiest tenants can succumb to the march of Dunedin’s ever-encroaching mould. So the flat itself deserves some praise here.
The location is perfectly close to Uni, but this does come with some challenges. Before our visit, marauding students had stolen the Silver Fox sign and tagged the flat’s door with red paint. But, surprisingly, none of the tenants heard any of this, which means that the flat’s probably very well insulated with a solid door, so another point earned there.
Inside you’ll find wonderfully high ceilings with hole-free walls and decently-sized bedrooms. The lounge is a good size for a 4-person flat and houses the heat pump. The kitchen, which was described as “spacious”, is actually a little bit cramped but still loads better than half the ones we’ve seen in Dunedin. It does have a handy little cubby area with plenty of storage, which the tenants have used to store an extra microwave supplied by the landlord. Score! The cooking hobs were a bit dinge, but we were reminded to not judge a book by its cover because “they actually cook really well”. The extractor fan actually worked (nice), and the fridge was tidy.
Upstairs was a bit weird, as the staircase ends in this bizarre sort of choose-your-own-adventure T-shaped bit. This could either be really fun (woohoo, parkour!) or potentially tricky to navigate after a few too many drinks. We preferred to think it was fun. The bathroom is actually pretty huge, and although it doesn’t have a shower dome, it’s quite clean. It’s got a washer-dryer combo in there, too, which is a bit weird but could be super convenient if you were to take a tumble into Deathstar’s mudpit and need to wash you and your clothes at the same time before chucking them in the dryer. Anywhere else this combo would be out of place, but it actually fits pretty well in Dunedin.
The bedrooms on the other end of the upper floor are similarly standard, with tall ceilings and decent windows and light. The doors all open into the same area which creates a bit of a jumble but it’s really not that bad. All in all, this is a very standard flat that meets anyone’s basic needs. It has a responsible landlord and a great location. And yet, this being Dunedin, those bare minimums are enough to net it second place.
Winner: Mansion on manor
Now THIS is a flat. Better than that, it’s a home. The place has recently been done-up by the landlord and her two sons, and they’ve created a genuinely incredible place to live. It’s got heated floors in the bathroom, for Christ’s sake. Spice racks. A leather couch that came with the flat. This place is insane.
We’ll start by describing what’s next door: a sort of Tale of Two Cities reminder of what could have been. It’s another property with a similar layout to the Mansion on Manor (as we’re calling it), but it’s been left uninhabited for what looks like a long time. To be honest, it genuinely does not look that much different to the worst flat on this list, which is really saying something. You can see into the abandoned property from the rear of the Mansion, which gives a decent impression of the scale of the place: high, skeletal beams and open rooms. Plenty of room to move around and lots of natural light.
In the Mansion, though, these amenities come with unbroken windows and a working heat pump. It’s a night and day difference. The kitchen itself was enough to net this place the top slot on the list, as it looks like something out of a cooking show. There are literally glass jars filled with lollies on the wall below a few bottles of gin, and ample cushioned seats to suit the day’s mood. There’s a bookcase full of decent reads and a circular dining table in a windowed rotunda, so you can really live out your dreams of escaping student poverty.