The Rebuild(TM): Tell us your story [updated]

It’s now exactly two years since the big earthquake that tore Christchurch apart, two-and-a-half years since the first large shake, and despite lots of talk about The Rebuild^TM, there’s been precious little rebuilding and lots and lots of hindrances and prohibitions on any building at all.

Perhaps because all the talk has been about The Rebuild—a phrase revealing the top-down thinking of central planners, who move with glacial pace their wonders to under-achieve--rather than about rebuilding—a word describing a process in which people just get on with it.

Which is why when I hear the grey ones talking ad nauseum about The Rebuild I want to scream.

So on this inauspicious anniversary, when we commemorate how government both central and local has managed to do to the city what the earthquake couldn’t quite manage, rather than me saying again what I’ve said umpteen times before about The Nonbuild (see below), why not take this chance, Cantabrian readers, to tell us what’s been happening to you.

Tell us your story.

JUST SOME OF THE STILL-RELEVANT POST-EARTHQUAKE COMMENTARY
THAT’S APPEARED HERE AT NOT PC:

• “I love the sound of breaking windows”
• The disaster that is EQC
• Something smells in the Christchurch Civic Centre
• Emancipating govt, enslaving free men
• NOT PJ: Miracle!
• TANSTAAFL
• Make Christchurch an Enterprise Zone, Not a Ward of the State
• The business of Christchurch was business
• 110,000 Christchurch home-owners need the grey ones to get the hell out of the way
• Don’t get “tough” on Christchurch building standards. Get smart.
• “Quake didn’t destroy us, council is”
• OPEN LETTER: Serious concerns of many of the people of Christchurch City
• ... and everyone in Christchurch will get a pony.
• Snail's pace
• “Sorry about the sewage, we are too busy gardening in the Red Zone!”
• NOT PJ: The Labour of Subdivision
• Christchurch property-owners shrug
• C.E.R.A = red tape
• “Mr Brownlee: Tear down this wall!”
• Is there any good reason for the Earthquake Commission to exist
• What would entice them back?
• How about we kill the planners instead?
• Scum rises to the top
• One year on, and Christchurch is still on welfare
• Earthquake engineering is not an exact science
• To rebuild Christchurch’s Cathedral? Or not to rebuild?
• The Grey Ones in Christchurch just got greyer
• Czar Sutton strangling Chch home-owners
• A conclusive experiment with a crucial lesson for Christchurch
• Is it any wonder investment is leaving Christchurch?
• Who pays for the Christchurch grandomania?
• The bill to “rebuild” Christchurch is starting to emerge—and it’s huge
• Christchurch’s Anti-Recovery Plan: Theft based on threadbare analysis
• Another story of government confiscation from central Christchurch
• NOT PJ: One Chance

UPDATE: I can’t resist fisking John Key’s media release to mark the second anniversary (Key’s coments are in italics):

Rebuilding Christchurch is one of the four priorities my Government has for this term in office…
…and it looks like a disaster. Still, with two of the other three “priorities” (stronger economy and responsible finances) looking worse by the month, and the fourth (asset sales) all blown out of the water, at least they’re all of a piece.  And at least he said “rebuilding.”

The destruction in greater Christchurch means we're facing unprecedented circumstances, but each time I visit the city I am staggered by the progress that has been made.
Progress? What progress?  Let’s see what he can spin to find something to boast about….

The land zoning process is pretty much complete.…
My god, is this really achievement number one?!   The planners, who have been active (for two frickin years!) drawing lines on paper prohibiting folk doing what they wish with their own property, are almost finished! Two years of folk knowing not what they might or might not be allowed to do!!  But cheer up, this process is now “pretty much complete.”

…and by the end of the year more than 50,000 house repairs are expected to be completed under the EQC managed repair programme. 
I really don’t think “managed” is the word to use for anything related to EQC. And this 50,000 figure is not “progress that has been made.”  It’s progress promised “by the end of the year,” promised with a smile and wave, with no care and every little responsibility because a meagre 13,000 houses is all that the “the EQC managed repair programme” has actually managed to repair in two fricken years! Not exactly progress. And not much to boast about.

The CBD red zone is decreasing and we expect the cordon to be gone by the middle of the year. 
Translation: The cordon around the city for the last two years keeping land and business owners from their property in the CBD might be taken down in a few months. It might. But only if, by then, we’ve turned the entire CBD into a carpark, with or without the permission of property owners.

Economic activity is improving, with latest figures showing 7.5 per cent growth in the region year on year, and
over 16,000 more people were employed in Christchurch last year.
”Last year”: i.e., a year in which economic activity was only just beginning to recover from being blasted to hell and back.   And while 16,000 more is better than 16,000 fewer, overall employment levels are still well below pre-earthquake employment levels.

In other words, don’t believe a frickin’ thing these bastards say.