April — The Foundations
The quiet month that made the loud ones possible. The directory went fully dynamic... 79 hand-built pages replaced by one live system, so every WestSide business now has a page that updates itself. And the plan for every Thursday that month: the 300 West laneway going to the young bands of Hawke's Bay... the WAMJam Sessions, backed by Music Works, Hustle and The Line. If you want the sound of a street deciding to build something, it was meant to be coming out of that laneway on a Thursday night, echoing all the way down the 300 block. It didn't get the HDC funding it needed... so the laneway waits, and the plan sits ready for a backer. Some things on the to-do list are money things. This is one.
May — The Civic Month
The month WAM went to town... literally. A submission to the HDC Annual Plan arguing for dedicated WestSide activation funding, presented in person at the hearing. Advocacy is slow work with long payoffs... this is the planting season, the kind of month that shows up in the numbers a year later. It is the patient, unglamorous work we wrote about in The Sort-It-Out Season: the levers that hold a place together are rarely the photogenic ones.
June — The Filling Strip
The proof the theory works arrived wearing shopfronts. A wave of new names took the strip's windows, and Move West went from a page to a pipeline... ten of them profiled in Ten Names, Two Blocks. Here's five, and what filling a window actually means:
Occupancy 88 percent. New payrolls, not just new signage.
July — The Building Month
And then the machine room opened. In four weeks, membership shipped eight working assets... each one free for shoppers, each one built to make the strip easier to visit than to scroll past.
The Eight
"Tell it the shop and how long you need... it names your park, times your stay and walks you to the door. Mobility mode finds the closest of twelve marked mobility parks."
"A live clock of every WestSide door, running on Hastings time. One hard rule: it never guesses."
"Tell it your mood and it names your dinner from 166 real dishes across WestSide kitchens. The end of the what-do-YOU-feel-like loop."
"Eleven salons, five hundred services, one honest price guide... the first of its kind in Hawke's Bay. Book with confidence, tip with knowledge."
"The strip's own hospitality job board. Workers find shifts, venues find staff, and it's free while we build the board."
"Search that actually answers... a dish, a service, a story, a shop. It draws from everything WestSide knows."
"The whole strip re-filmed in UltraHD for Google Maps, block by block. The Walk-In brings the same treatment inside your shop, open 24/7."
"29 articles in four months... 267 business mentions across 106 businesses. 81 percent of the strip has been written about. If you trade on Heretaunga West, odds are we've told your story already... and if we haven't, you're on the list."
The Unglamorous Bit
Some of the biggest work doesn't demo well: a full security hardening sprint, page speed rebuilt into the high 90s, and a single source of truth under the directory so every tool tells the same story. Boring is a feature. Boring means it works.
WestSide is going for the 2027 Facade Awards. The Art Deco bones above our verandahs are the best things this city ever built in a hurry... and we've made the full case in Wake the Walls Up. If you own a building on the strip: Council support may be available through the HDC Façade Enhancement Scheme, and Alan Passchier's design service is available to WAM members to take a facade from idea to drawings. The street that gets photographed is the street that gets visited. Let's wake the walls up together... 2027 is closer than it sounds.
The Board Report
Accountability, in public: the full four-month coverage report... every business mentioned, every article counted... lives at hastingscbd.nz/board-coverage, password westsideq2. Members, that's your money's audit trail.
Your Vantage Point
This report is one view of the street. Yours might differ, and we want it: how is the WestSide looking from your counter, your building, your couch? Tell us... praise, gripes, ideas, all of it goes into the next four months.
And if you've been watching from the sidelines... this is the moment. The theory is proven, the machine is running, and the to-do list is honestly enormous: more tools, more stories, the facade push, the training programme, a street that markets itself. Membership is $98 a month and includes more editorial value than it costs. Join the builders. There is a LOT more to get done.
This is an editorial report from the WestSide Association Membership about work it has done and plans to do. Funding applications, council schemes and award entries referenced are in progress at time of writing (July 2026), not guaranteed outcomes. Membership pricing is current at publication. For specifics on the facade scheme or joining, talk to us directly.
Four months. Eight assets. One street. See you out here.