A traffic bypass stole 20,000 potential daily visitors from its main streets and local businesses. Three years on, how are the Waikato town’s 9,000 residents coping?

The tourism centre is closed – “permanently”, says the sign. The cafe next door, once called River Haven, now with two missing letters making it “Rive Have”, is boarded up. Every window in the nearby sports bar has been smashed by vandals. Bright pink graffiti is splashed across its walls. Further along, a once-popular fruit and vege store is smothered in the stuff, making it difficult to decipher the building’s original colour. Two rickety chairs beckon, offering a bleak sit down.

Once, this was an enforced destination for any traveller heading along State Highway 1. Huntly’s location – “one full bladder distance from Auckland” – made it a perfect pitstop to fuel up, grab a Big Mac or Quarter Pack, top up on coffees and snacks at local cafes, perhaps take in a mighty view of the Waikato River, or enjoy a picnic around one of Huntly’s four lakes (Hakanoa, Kimihia, Puketirini and Waahi) before continuing on your way.

Now, Huntly barely seems to exist. Blink while heading south along SH1’s sparkling new motorway bypass and you’ll miss two signs, one obscured by a lamp post, that indicate the small Waikato township is still there. Unlike Pōkeno (ice creams!) and Mercer (bacon sandwiches!), no one tries to entice you to visit Huntly. If you do turn off, the 5km drive along ye olde SH1 feels like a blast from the past, a faded memory of what it used to be, except bleaker, more desperate, with once vibrant pitstops closed and in a state of disrepair. 

You might think the same of Huntly’s township. But those who live and work there don’t think that at all. Dire predictions of Huntly’s demise before the bypass opened in 2020 – a week before the the country’s first Covid-19 lockdown, making it a double whammy – haven’t come to fruition. Yes, things have changed. With a population of just 9,000, Huntly still has its problems. Many shops have turned over or closed.

Ram raids and armed robberies have become a major problem. One local business owner says he fears for his life most days. But many like not having all that traffic coming through their town. Another resident told me: “The doom and gloom hasn’t happened.” Someone else said: “As a town, we’re fine.” In other words, write Huntly off at your peril.

Many small Aotearoa townships have been through this kind of thing. As the country’s big cities get bigger, they require larger motorways allowing more traffic to drive into and out of them. That means carving out chunks of hillsides and farmland to lay down massive tarmac slabs for thousands of cars to plough along at high speeds. If you can’t see the facilities offered by small towns along the way, you’re not going to stop at a dairy, or a bakery, or an ice cream shop.

You don’t have to look far for recent examples of this exact thing happening. No one goes to Bethlehem now the Tauranga bypass is complete. In Timaru, another SH1 project smashed local businesses. The same thing is expected to happen when a motorway project near Levin is finished.

In Wellington, motorists are enjoying faster commutes thanks to the $1.25 billion Transmission Gully motorway, a long-delayed and controversial 27-kilometre project that began in 2014 and finally opened in 2022. There’s no denying that new roads have reduced the number of accidents. But businesses in Ōtaki, Waikanae and Paraparaumu are foundering, with empty shops in places that used to be populated by travellers and tourists busting for the toilet and hungry for a feed.

That’s what everyone thought would happen in Huntly. But, three years after the bypass opened, it’s buzzing. There’s no better word to describe Huntly’s main street, handily called Main Street, on the Tuesday when The Spinoff pays it a visit. People sit outside cafes, sipping coffees and buttering scones. Others gather on street corners, taking their time to talk things over as light drizzle falls.

Huntly’s biggest drawcard, that Deka sign, desperately needs a clean, but it looms over everyone, an ironic tribute to a long dead consumer brand. “I don’t get paid until tonight,” quips a man in a leather jacket and bare feet standing nearby. He’s using his huge smile as a way of persuading a friend to buy him a drink. But she can’t – she’s broke too.

It’s just passed midday and refreshments are on everyone’s minds. Down at Main Street Cafe, owner Zig hums to himself as customers try to choose a meal from a food cabinet where everything looks good. One local has her phone to her ear taking orders from hungry family members. “Who wants the pulled pork roll? Brendan?” she asks, relaying orders to Zig. “What do the other two want? A potato-top pie? A ham and tomato panini?”

When a couple of school-aged kids on scooters pop in to say hi, she passes them some coins and tells them to eat too.

Zig struggled to make a similar venture work in the nearby township of Te Kauwhata, so he moved it to Huntly two months ago. Things soon picked up. An empty ex-printing shop as a neighbour didn’t worry him. Neither did the bypass detouring tourists out of Huntly’s way. “That doesn’t affect us,” he says. Zig’s there to serve locals, and they seem very happy with what he’s offering. “Everyone deserves this food,” he says as he pops a potato-top pie as large as my face into a microwave. For $8.50, it comes with a side salad, balsamic dressing and a big pot of tomato sauce. It’s a huge meal. It’s delicious.

He seems to be the talk of the town. At the front desk of real estate company Harcourts, two staff weigh up their lunch options. “Thai’s not open, that would have been nice,” says one, pointing to a roller door covering a closed store across the road. Instead, she suggests she might go to the cafe Nikki’s, or perhaps visit Zig for one of those pies.

Harcourts’ managing director Dallas Hodge finally emerges. She moved to Huntly from Auckland in the late 90s, craving a better lifestyle, a cheaper mortgage and quieter streets for her kids to grow up on. She got exactly what she wanted, so encouraged her family to move down too. “My mum and dad moved down. My husband’s parents moved down. One of my brothers lives here now,” she says. “They really like it.”

Sure, there have been plenty of changes in the community. “We used to have a real variety of stores, a toy shop, shoe shop, stationery shop, appliance store, sewing shop,” says Hodge. The opening of shopping centre The Base in Hamilton, just 20 minutes away, stole many of their customers. Then the bypass went in, taking even more. Now, the banks have gone too. “We had ANZ, BNZ, Westpac…”

Still, Hodge isn’t complaining about all those lunch joints. “We have a variety of options and they all seem to be thriving,” she says. Property prices remain steady, but offer great value for money compared to Auckland. Hodge has a three-bed, one-bath on Mary Street listed for $639,000. Sometimes, when she’s done talking property, Hodge heads off for a peaceful walk around one of those lakes.

Not everyone is so enamoured with the place. Ash Parmar has seen a different side of Huntly to others. He’s owned his bottle shop Bottle-O for 18 years. These days he keeps the front door locked at all times. Customers are asked to “knock gently” to get his attention. “It means no one can run in and give me a fright,” he says. He points to a fog machine on the ceiling that can instantly fill his shop with smoke. It’s a deterrent, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

Parmar’s made headlines for the number of ram raids and robberies at his store, and for speaking out about others around him. “There was an aggravated robbery in Huntly last week, another in Taupiri, a ram raid on the fruit shop last week,” he says. He talks about gang problems, teen truancy and street violence. He wouldn’t walk down Huntly’s main street late at night. “Some days when I wake up, I think, what the fuck am I doing here?”

So why stay? Lately, Parmar’s been wondering exactly that. He’s lost count of the amount of times he’s been robbed. “The list would be very long,” he says. “It is what it is.” He dreams of the day he can sell his shop – he’s in negotiations with one interested party now – and focus on running his online whisky store Eight PM. Until then? He’s stuck, sitting on a chair by his front door, letting customers in one at a time. “You can’t just get up and leave. You’ve still got to go and face the music,” he says. “I work in a shop, in arguably a shit town, scared for my life.”

Yet even he admits there’s a good side to living in Huntly. A round of golf costs him just $30. It’s close enough to Auckland and Hamilton if he wants to attend concerts or All Blacks games. A popular community Facebook group offers networking opportunities and support for anyone who’s struggling. Recently, Parmar used it to offer help to a woman who’d arrived in town with just one bag, an umbrella and nowhere to live. “It shows you there’s some amazing people here,” he says.

Then he walks me around to the Deka sign. He doesn’t own it, but he proudly admits he supplies the power that lights it up. People arrive in the Bottle-O’s carpark every day to take photos of it. “It makes people smile,” he says. It makes Parmar smile too.

David Whyte says Huntly’s great, because of course he does. As general ward councillor, it’s his job to say good things about the region. “We’re a bit of a hidden gem,” he says. “The lakes are fantastic.” Yes, bus-loads of tourists have stopped turning up at cafes like “Rive Have”, but Whyte believes that’s more an after-effect of Covid than anything to do with the motorway bypass.

Instead, he believes Huntly has the motorway to thank for reconnecting it. “It sliced the town in half,” he says. “On a Friday afternoon, the whole town would jam up because of Aucklanders heading south.” He talks about traffic backed up at lights, of accidents bringing grief and drama. Now, residents can casually cross the old SH1 road any time, without “saying a hail Mary and checking their life insurance”.

He believes it’s about to get even better, with an upcoming restoration project planned to turn Kimihia Lake into a full-time recreational facility.

If Huntly’s so good, why isn’t someone out there banging the drum, telling people to make that 5km trip off the bypass, to grab a face-sized potato-top pie, to meet people like Ash and Zig, and pay tribute to the Deka sign, even though the bypass tries to tell them not to? “I don’t know,” responds Whyte. “Perhaps that should be me.”

Do locals and business owners even want tourists to come back? In a quick stop at the Z petrol station on the way out, just like old times, I think I get my answer. As I pay for my gas, I ask the attendant if things are going OK now the bypass has diverted thousands of customers away from his pumps. He nods. “We’re busier [than before],” he says. He seems content. His smile seems to speak for all of Huntly.