Smith to push Auckland Council to relax rules on apartment size, yard size, balconies and carparks to speed up new house building

By Lynn Grieveson

Housing Minister Nick Smith will tell the Auckland Council at their Housing Accord meeting on Friday to relax the planning rules it imposes on housing developments to allow the building of more affordable homes.

Smith told reporters in Parliament on Wednesday developers needed greater flexibility to build "the full range of housing" and called for regulations covering such things as apartment size, yard size, balconies and carparks to be relaxed.

"If we want to get more affordable housing we need the Auckland Council to have a hard look at some of their regulatory controls around the number of carparks, around the size of those apartments and, even in terms of suburban housing, with the rules around front yards and back yards and side yards," Smith said.

"What the development community is saying is with the rules they have at the moment it is very difficult for them to deliver houses in the sort of NZ$300,000 to NZ$400,000 range, yet the political pressure is to deliver more of those," he said.

"That will be one of the topics I will be speaking through with the mayor of Auckland and the Council when I have my regular housing accord meeting this Friday."

Smith said the regulations "incentivise the building industry to build bigger, more expensive homes."

He denied it was a simple matter of just allowing smaller sized apartments (something Finance Minister Bill English suggested in a pre-Budget speech in April).

'Developers' gripes'

"For instance, one of the biggest gripes of the development sector is actually the setback rules from the street frontage that make it really difficult and expensive, " Smith said.

"I am not going to be telling the Council what that size should be. What I am telling the Council is that they need to work more closely with the development community to make sure those rules make it possible to build houses that are in the more affordable range."

Smith said the regular housing accord meeting with Auckland Council would include further discussions on additional special housing areas and "other mechanisms" to make sure the target of 39,000 new consented homes or sections within three years is met.

"With the special housing areas we have declared to date we are up to 33,500," he said.

"Not all of them will deliver houses in the first three years. That's why I am working hard on a fourth tranche of special housing areas, but I am as determined as I was on day one and as confident as I was on day one on meeting those 39,000 new homes."

"The identification of the special housing areas does cause some angst in communities and as we've announced with the third tranche, there are communities that are uncomfortable about paddocks being converted into housing or intensification in the central city areas."

"I've been encouraged by the level of backbone that the Auckland Council have shown to date in ensuring that providing additional housing supply has taken priority, but the government is keeping the pressure on Auckland Council. My hope would be to deliver at least another 13 special housing areas this side of the election, bringing it up to a century, up to 100 but we are going to need to keep that pressure on if we are going to get those pretty ambitious numbers."

Earlier Smith appeared before the Social Services Select Committee where he said the Council was on track to meet its first first year consent target of 9,000, but the second and third year targets of 13,000 and 17,000 building consents would be "a stretch."