Public policy think tank the New Zealand Initiative says the "compact city ideology" often actually makes problems it's proponents want to solve such as high house prices, congestion, and declining liveability, worse, and councils are better off freeing up land supply for housing.
These comments come as the NZ Initiative issues a report entitled Up or Out? Examining the Trade-offs of Urban Form. The NZ Initiative argues the evidence is obvious in Auckland where urban development limits and building restrictions have significantly contributed to high land prices, and notes councils in both Wellington and Tauranga seem to have missed the link between land supply and housing affordability. Instead, they're pursuing "compact city agendas" that favour building up instead of out.
"The compact city ideology is built on the belief that cities should be sustainable in their use of resources. These policies take many forms, but are principally concerned with restricting the outwards spread of the urban footprint," NZ Initiative executive director Oliver Hartwich says.
"In short, compact cities seek to build up, instead of out. Yet an international examination of the historical and academic record shows this planning ideology failed to deliver any meaningful improvements on these measures, and in many cases exacerbated the problems it sought to solve."
“The evidence is plain to see, especially in places like Auckland, where urban development limits and building restrictions have significantly contributed to the price of land. Yet many councils, like Tauranga and Wellington, appear to have missed the link between land supply and housing affordability, and are pursuing their own compact city agendas," says Hartwich.
The NZ Initiative argues the compact city ideology's focus on high public transit investment is unlikely to make a meaningfully reduction to traffic congestion because of the appeal private vehicles have to the likes of working parents and people who don't work in the central business district.
"Furthermore, evidence cited in the report by the US Environmental Protection Agency shows a strong relationship between high population densities, traffic, and pollution concentrations. We’ve seen the same trend of high house prices and congestion again and again when examining the track record of compact cities,” says Hartwich.
“These are facts that are hardly ever discussed by city officials when they take their development strategies to voters, which are instead coached ‘clean-green’ platitudes. We hope this report will change that.”
The NZ Initiative also says its report found that:
Zoning restrictions have been quantifiably shown to increase land supply shortages and dramatically reduce housing affordability.
New Zealand’s main cities are characterised by severely unaffordable housing markets.
Far less restrictive planning regimes in the United States and Europe have consistently nurtured affordable housing markets for decades.
US cities that have chosen to pursue compact development strategies tend to be more congested than dispersed urban environments (urban areas in North America most resemble New Zealand cities).
There is a weak relationship between high population densities and low obesity rates.
Topology and climate have a bigger influence over walking and cycling activity levels than urban form.
Quantitative research in Vancouver, a compact city, shows urban areas with high walkability are exposed to significantly higher primary pollutants than suburban areas.
29 Comments
Hong Kong apartments are not places to live, or even to cook. They are boxes to sleep in. The reason why most Cantonese socialise, live, eat, drink on the streets is precisely ecuse they do not have room to do it at home.
They have the climate for it, too. Would you be prepared to spend 8 hours a day out in the open, in New Zealand? Eat outside? In all seasons?
The problem is and always will be services and infrastructure. If you're going to build up, you need to plan your water and waste. Public transport (because you an say goodbye to car parks built on premium land).
All of which is currently not being done.
You can't just pack more people onto and into the same place, and expect your problems to go away.
On the contrary. They'll only just start, then.
and the energy use? We can see how US surburbia has gone and badly now petrol is $4US (ish) and going to get worse. So lets repeat it here? oh yes that makes so much sense, not. When petrol hits $3 a litre here how many ppl will be willing to pay $200 a tank a week? or able?
So compact v spread? well lets say both are not good, the fix? why restrict inflow of ppl. Then neither expensive and un-workable solution is needed. We also wont need more hospitals and other infrastructure we cannot afford to build.
regards
How exactly do you propose to prevent people from moving to Auckland if that is what they want to do?
If you want to live in a town that is small both in population and in geographical area, there are plenty of those available.
Do you really believe that (say) ten towns of 30,000 people each would require fewer hospitals and less infrastructure than does a town of 300,000 people?
Auckland has plenty of land and room to expand and spread. No reason to artificialy impose high density. I think the only reason policy makers do that is to keep house prices high. Many of these people are invested heavily in properties themselves and have vested interest in property prices, to protect their own nest eggs.
Talking about markets & traffic congestion - peak hour road travel is completely subsidised. Peak hour drivers pay no congestion tolls at all.
Implement congestion tolling, remove density restrictions from land use zoning (adverse effects still to be mitigated) & then let the market decide how much development should go up & how much out.
Talking about markets & traffic congestion - peak hour road travel is completely subsidised. Peak hour drivers pay no congestion tolls at all.
Implement congestion tolling, remove density restrictions from land use zoning (adverse effects still to be mitigated) & then let the market decide how much development should go up & how much out.
We don't "artificialy impose high density". We artificially impose low density from edge of CBD out. This dicussion is about affordable housing. It is easy to do $600K + fringe housing (I do). There is enough money at that level to finance the required infrastructure. But that is not affordable housing. There is already on the market today cheap 'affordable' housing in fringe areas like Weymouth and Clendon Park. It does not sell, whereas centrally located apartments at same price do (and have far higher rental returns). Who do you think wants to build loss making cheap fringe sprawl that doesn't sell? Why do you think we need to zone for more of what people don't want instead of zoning for more of what does sell?
Catherine Cashmore's piece on capitalism, democracy and land is worth a read.
"The social consequence that arises from this costs us millions in welfare payments throughout the year. Yet it is still advertised and promoted as the road to riches, creating a “FIRE” economy (finance, insurance and real estate) – disproportionally inflating land costs without due acknowledgement of the consequence."
"Whilst rich land-‘lords’ and mining magnets grow wealthy, collecting their unearned windfall in economic rent – they ironically tell the young tenant saddled with student debt “so you think the world owes you a living?” while government stretches out its hand to the low waged worker commanding they “pull their weight.”
http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2014/06/capitalism-democracy-and-land/
This 'study' is full of flawed assumptions and bad data. It's reads like a selective literature survey by a pro sprawl, anti-transit body.
In exaiming public transits impact on congestion, they only looked at rail, and consider busses road-users and thus congestion causers. Never mind that busses make up 80% of Aucklands transit and that one bus takes up 1% of the road-space that cars do. Nevermind that most cities have extensive bus-lanes so that buses are not caught in, and do not cause congestion for single-occupancy-vehicles. If all the people who take the bus started driving in, would our streets have the same level of congestion? Could the northern motorway and harbour bridge handle a 40% increase in vehicles heading to the CDB? Buses are transit stupid.
And when counting congestion, they measure it as car speed vs speed limit. What about all the people not driving? In compact cities you have decent train, bus, cycling, and walking options. That's the whole point of the compact city transport model, you avoid congestion by not having to drive. Yet people people not driving are excluded from their congestion measure.
Once again they hold up Houston as a target model. Where do we have the room for this in Auckland?
http://blog.allstate.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Houston-Traffic.jpg
In arguing that investment in public transport does not get people out of cars they state for Portland "The fact that less than 7% of the city’s population rely on public transport despite 27 years of intensive transit investments, to say nothing of the budget shortfalls and heavy subsidies, suggests the strategy is not paying of"
Yet the american census bureau shows 12% do. In addition 6% walk and 6% bicyle. http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview…According to last debate on this the 'think tank' will probably argue that someone living in a CBD without a car who walks to work actually causes more traffic congestion/pollution than someone who lives in a sprawl house who drives everywhere (because there's more pollution/congestion in the CBD). The Demographia guy Cox argued that although per person sprawl living causes more pollution it's more spread out so sprawl is more environmentally friendly than denser urban forms...
Density is going win this boring never ending arguement.
(no density around my 800sqm central auckland property tho thanks)
ALso - it will be a wonderful day when I can board the subway train underneath my CBD office and head directly up to Krd in minutes, to visit my friends at Calendar and Vegas girls respectively.
SK
Well as long as you are building freestanding sprawl houses underground without a fringe then it will make housing cheaper like Texas, however if you build apartments underground then you are causing artificial land constraints and will force house prices up. the 'think tank' will confirm this.
Again, what has been overlooked is the impact on the entire market of freeing up land on the fringe. As there is a direct correlation between prices on the fringe and land going back into the CBD, ie lower fringe prices, lower CDB prices, or conversely higher fringe prices, higher CBD prices. This correlation is present in all cities, regardless of their urban fringe policies.
Lower fringe prices are good for all purchasers whether you want low density or high density, whether you want to live in a stand-alone home in suburbia or an apartment in the CDB.
But of course you will have already seen a reason why you may not want this to happen, that is if you already own property.
And there is another reason based on compact city ideology and that is freeing up of land on the fringe denies these ideologues the ability to influence (increase at the rate needed) the density of land within the compact city boundaries. A density which is needed to support more and different types of PT infrastructure. At present the density of places like Auckland is not dense enough to hit the trigger point at which their favoured PT options become more theoretically viable. There is much merit in making cities more liveable and that can include (but not limited to) increasing density, but to do that at the expense of housing affordability is counter to achieving a more liveable city for ALL its inhabitants.
If you still think that making a house in Weymouth a bit cheaper will affect the price of a Grey Lynn villa when we've just had years of the exact opposite happening (rises in Grey Lynn while Weymouth prices were going down) ... never mind. I'm sure your religious zeal is stronger than real world examples.
Same old pro sprawl propoganda regurgitated again. I see Hugh is credited in the 'think-tank' - The same Hugh who claimed that 1km of infrastructure and roading is more expensive than 10km's of infrastructure and roading, because, well he never could explain - but obviously the 'think tank' were impressed.
We don't just want the cheapest city anyway - we want the best city. Just 'cos you can make cheaper milk by adding melamine doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Again the absurd claim that densification causes more pollution and congestion - no. Per person it's less pollution and congestion - and their data showing this won't account for how much of the congestiona nd pollution in denser areas is caused by the sprawlers driving into denser areas.
...and as for Houston, as was established in last debate on this the pro sprawler exemplar 'Woodlands' has a greater proportion of apartments than Auckland and a lot more development controls.
Correct, per person it is likely to lead to less polution.
Let's say tripple the population and twice the polution, a good reduction per person. So now we have three times as many people breathing in twice as much crap.
Yes, I can see that being good for your health.
It is not about how much polution there is per person, it is about how much that person breathes in.
Not much per person polution in Bejing either.
Having said that, higher density living will be positive for range of issues but not all.
Four fallacies trap anyone who offers an opinion on urban form. Although they mostly trap council planners.
Fallacy #1: denser utility networks are cheaper to provide per subscriber
Obviously true up to a point but, leaving aside transport and greenspace which quickly run into congestion issues, even energy, telecommunications and water services also reach a point where cost per subscriber starts to rise again. There is an issue with having to install disproportionately expensive high-end gear to handle high volumes of activity. More importantly very dense networks suffer from untenable exposure to single point of failure events. At this point providers have to spend a lot of money of making their networks more resilient.
There is a sweet spot for infrastructure providers somewhere between rural and ultra-dense forms. I can’t tell you where that is but I don’t think anyone else can either.
Fallacy #2: Network provider costs are the only costs to consider.
The denser the urban form the more service infrastructure lies beyond the network providers’ demarcation points. In a high-rise building you will find water pumps, water pipes, water storage and backup power generators to provide internal reticulation of water. Tenants of that building will pay for those water service costs one way or another on top of their rates. In a residential home you will find a few cheap, skinny pipes. The actual cost of providing water in both cases is the sum total of the network costs and the on-property costs.
Fallacy #3: Council costs provide sound economic signals
Not in this case. Councils do a good job of financial management including accounting for the costs of the infrastructure they build and operate. They don’t put much effort into understanding and charging for the value of the land on which the infrastructure is sited. Although they have to put a nominal value for land in their balance sheets councils never incorporate land value in their budgets or charging algorithms. Lambton Quay is obviously a way more valuable piece of real estate per square metre than a suburban street in Island Bay. Accurate economic signals about the cost of providing infrastructure in Wellington would require it to cost more to flush the loo downtown than at the edges.
If you think this is crazy then consider we already do this in some places. In the good old days the Electricity Department could bung transmission towers for the national grid wherever they wanted under the Public Works Act. During the 80’s the newly created Transpower had to negotiate easements with landowners – i.e. to rent the land they use. Now any planning for new routes must take into account the land value for those new routes.
Fallacy #4: we have now accounted for the true cost of infrastructure provision
Easily the most serious of these fallacies is the provider-centric view of the world. The real cost of infrastructure includes the “disutility” costs of stuff that does not meet peoples’ real needs. Going shopping in a car in the suburbs is way more convenient than catching the lift, walking in all weathers to the shop and humping the groceries back to an apartment. The true cost of any infrastructure design must take into account the costs to the end user of being forced into actions they would rather not take.
Whether we like it or not NZers have voted over the last thirty years to be a car nation preferring private over shared modes of transport. Any urban design that forces residents into shared transport (including lifts) against their preferences or forces them to join a gym because there is no park to run around needs to factor in the economic disbenefits as well as the costs of building and running real stuff.
Councils only think of themselves (surprise, surprise) so they are poorly set up to act as judges of the optimal urban shape. It would help if they were either regulators or infrastructure providers but not both.
1, 2 Rely on existing reliable infrastrucutre. As councils (and businesses) know putting in the best gear for the job then ripping it out half way through its finanicial life because some pen pushers thought it should be better will always be very expensive no matter the density.
the density is around cost recovery - if 5yr ROI is guaranteed, do you want to spend 800k or 800M? unfortunately the more the services are put in (especially on the cheap) then the more it costs to overhaul/adjust. Builders and farmers know this, which is why they're constantly being accused of "low productivity"..... it's not low productivity, it's low risk and low capital intensity. Have high capital intensity, and every bit of adjustment will have a larger passed on cost to consumers (will look similar to inflation, but it's not, it's poor management of capital)
(4) paying rates and taxes is an action I would prefer not to take. It makes a large dent in the sustainability and re-investment in any business or persons' life.
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