By Alex Tarrant
There has never been a better time for apartment building in Auckland, as lessons learnt from previous failures will mean good quality design and building work on new projects, Auckland Council Deputy Mayor Penny Hulse says.
Following yesterday's response by the government to the Productivity Commission's report on housing affordability, Hulse said the Council was looking at ways to encourage 'going up in the city,' construction of a wider range of housing, and releasing more land on Auckland's outskirts for residential development.
Underbuilding in Auckland over recent years - Westpac economists reckon that for every new dwelling built in the city in the three years to June 2011, Auckland got seven new residents - has seen prices hit new highs in recent months.
Speaking on TV3's Firstline on Tuesday morning, Hulse put the underbuilding down to a combination of factors, "the predominant factor being the global recession."
"Simply put, our developers just aren’t in a position to do some of the big developments that we need," she said.
The council was working with developers on how it could better incentivise more residential construction by changing some of its planning rules.
“We’ve been working on this for the last year – before the government told us that we needed to," Hulse said.
“We’re looking at extracting the best possible value out of the land that the developers have. In other words, looking for creative ways to fit a different kind of housing on site," she said.
That included “going up in the city, looking at a different range of housing, and also releasing land on the edges.”
Asked about Aucklanders' distrust of apartment building following the leaky homes debacle, Hulse said those concerns would be dealt with via urban design guidelines.
"We simply need to have better designed houses, we need to work with our architects, and our builders," she said.
“The reality is, the government, bless their hearts, have probably given a reasonably simplistic approach, which is, do it faster. We’re saying, cut the red tape, but do it well. That’s the work that we need to do.
“There’s probably never been a better time to look at building apartments, because we know all of the things that we don’t want to do," Hulse said.
“We’re working with architects, designers and builders. We’ve got the new unitary plan, that I’m chairing, that we’re working on, and we’re making good urban design absolutely central to that. It doesn’t always have to be expensive, but there are some things that we need to do better than we have done before," she said.
“So this is a really good time to look at good building in our city, the range of housing choices, with a better quality than our community are used to. That’s the only way that we’re actually going to get the Auckland we want."
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