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Home for Rangi Carroll was the cold, grey concrete of Auckland’s CBD. For five years his bed was a rumpled sleeping bag, his roof the open sky, his walls the inner-city facades and his family and friends were his fellow streeties. But the 57-year-old refused to let how he lived on the city streets shape the way people saw him. “My life is far from destitute ... I’ve become known as someone who achieved anyway,”
More than a decade since controversial law reform, a brothel owner tells says her modern establishment is finally bringing prostitution out of shadows. Dressed in trousers and a loose-fitting shirt, holding her baby to her breast, Antonia Murphy is a far cry from pop culture expectations of a brothel madam. But the San Francisco-born and raised, Ivy League-educated mother is the madam of Whangarei's The Bach, an enterprise she's taking pains to describe as an ethical brothel.
Crumbling brick-facades, overgrown lawns, a rusty caravan, a place of baptist worship, large commercial lots and a block of sober flats, visited monthly by drug-detecting canines, line Auckland's "cheapest" street. The people who call this street, which borders the suburbs of Glen Eden and Kelston, home are a mixed bag of single workers, students, young couples, small families, multi-generational family groups and recent migrants.