This Wednesday, Auckland Councillors will vote to make space in the city's zoning plan for two million new homes whether they like it or not.
Elected officials will be free to choose between having medium-density homes allowed anywhere in the city, or the chance to draw a bespoke plan which concentrates some of that housing into high-density developments in strategic locations.
But central government policy now dictates that New Zealand’s biggest cities have to make available enough housing development opportunities for 30 years of population growth.
The outcome of this vote has already been decided. Councillors will vote for the second option, but some still see it as a way to delay the process while lobbying for exemptions.
Wealthy suburbanites have recruited several councillors and the Deputy Prime Minister to lead a last ditch effort to prevent both medium and high density housing being built where they live.
They say more housing should be packed into less attractive suburbs, or in new developments on the urban/rural boundary — up to 30 kilometers away from the central business district.
Meanwhile, suburbs within just a few kilometres of the CBD should be preserved as quiet, low-density areas with pricey villas, street carparks, and plenty of leafy foliage.
Keep in mind: Nobody in those suburbs will be forced to build anything, so these activists are really asking the state to restrict their neighbours’ property rights.
Put in this context, David Seymour’s support for these groups is completely at odds with the Act Party’s broader efforts to remove regulatory restrictions on private property.
He is allowing this ideological flexibility to exploit a gap in the political market. Both National and Labour support intensification in major cities, and so the last holdouts need somebody else to vote for…
Universally acknowledged
The truth is that large cities have high-density housing in their central areas. This simple fact should not be controversial, unexpected, or resisted. It is an inevitable reality.
Auckland is a city of more than 1.5 million people and growing. It cannot preserve large swathes of its inner suburbs to be museums for 19th century villas, or as sleepy villages for residents who have lost interest in the city’s future.
There are likely to be some streets or blocks which deserve protection. Ponsonby’s Franklin Road, which hosts an annual Christmas light display for the public, springs to mind.
It should be limited to places where the character provides an amenity for the wider public, and not just because its current residents don’t want to share it with new ones.
Many bits of proper heritage can be preserved without stopping development. (For example, the new Ashburton District Council building cleverly incorporates the historic Pioneer Hall as a children’s library).
Neither should a city continually sprawl into the countryside. This is costly for tax and ratepayers who have to fund water infrastructure and transport connections. Urban sprawl also eats into the productivity and cultural advantages of having populous cities.
This is not the view of one raving journalist interviewing his keyboard. It is a firm consensus across the political spectrum, shared by economists and planning professionals.
A city on a hill
On Thursday last week, Housing Minister Chris Bishop and Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown were speaking at the grand opening of one of these dreaded apartment buildings.
It was Ockham Residential’s new high-rise buildings in Point Chevalier, called Toi and Whetū, which are part of a multi-decade redevelopment of the old Unitec grounds.
Mayor Brown heralded the project, which will eventually be a mixed-use urban village with dense residential and commercial developments, as being the future of the city.
“Celebrate this! This is the Auckland that's coming, it's the Auckland I'm proud to push for,” he said. “I thank [ Bishop] for showing he's a minister in Wellington that actually listens to Auckland. More of that, please,” Brown said.
Brown went on to complement Ockham and Bishop for saving ratepayers’ money by choosing to build in an area where infrastructure is ready for the development.
“I know there are a few in Wellington who want us to go out further, but we just had a very good lesson about this,” he said.
The mayor said he had recently opened the “flashiest and most expensive” sewerage plant he’d ever seen. It was built to service the area around Warkworth and Snells Beach, which had been developed despite insufficient infrastructure — forcing the council into costly upgrades.
Bishop was more diplomatic in his speech, but similarly complimented the Ockham development for being built “in locations with high amenity and access to transport”.
“That's precisely what we need to be doing as a city, as a country, developing areas where people want to live … Our cities need to grow both up and out. We need bigger cities and to have bigger cities, we need more houses,” he said.
Enable housing, win elections
There has been a definite vibe shift in housing policy discussions. Most election-winning politicians support intensifying cities and those who don’t are being forced to do it anyway.
Many of these candidates are more than willing to take the fight openly to the holdouts, betting that policy will win them more votes than it costs.
Mayor Brown bragged in his speech that he lived in an apartment surrounded by all sorts of buildings—new and heritage, residential and commercial—and that he caught the bus to work each day.
He said he was “pleased” to see the price of public transport trending down and the price of using a car trending upwards — not a traditionally popular statement in Auckland.
“The Minister there [Bishop] gets it, and we work together on this stuff. Not all of our councillors get this, unfortunately, particularly they don't get it when there's an election coming up,” he said.
But that may be changing. More and more candidates are running explicitly pro-housing intensification campaigns, while those who favour more restrictive policies are struggling.
Andrew Little, the leading candidate for Wellington mayor, supports the city’s new intensification plan which was passed by Tory Whanau’s council this term.
His campaign website says housing is unaffordable because the city had issued fewer dwelling consents than its competitors due to “density limits, overuse of heritage protection rules, and an anti-development culture”.
“This has contributed to a housing crunch that made housing unaffordable and has forced families to move out of the city into wider Wellington, other parts of the country, or overseas.”
Voter polls show Little and Brown’s opponents, who are campaigning on more restrictive housing supply policies, are being trounced — on first preference votes, at least.
Wellington contender Ray Chung said in an interview he would prefer a situation like in the San Francisco Bay Area, where residents are moving into surrounding cities for cheaper housing.
Telling voters they should move to a different city is not really a winning argument.
Short-term slump
A stronger argument is that house prices are stagnant and some rents are beginning to fall, which surely means there isn’t a housing shortage anymore.
It is true that only one of the two Ockham apartment buildings in Point Chevalier has sold any units, the other will be retained as rental units until the purchase market picks up again.
But the flaw in this argument is that short-term demand for housing has softened due to the recession and housing policy needs to be set for the very long-term.
If it turns out people don’t want to live in apartment buildings near central train stations, very few will ever be built. Zoning rules only limit housing supply, they do not create it.
Housing supply is provided by developers in response to market demand for their construction, and nobody wants to own an empty apartment tower.
Looser zoning rules enable the market to supply the kind of housing people want, in locations where they want to live, at a price they can afford. While tighter zoning rules create more distortions and force people to live in housing less suited to their needs.
City planning shouldn’t be a complete free-for-all but people should generally be free to live in the type of housing they prefer.
That may be an affordable apartment near a Mt Eden train station, a very expensive villa near Ponsonby, a new townhouse in Mt Roskill, or a quarter-acre lot in Drury.
Zoning rules should make it all possible. The options available to the next generation of city residents shouldn’t be dictated by the strong feelings of a select few today.
Politicians across the spectrum are realising this, embracing the future, and winning elections.
37 Comments
It cannot preserve large swathes of its inner suburbs to be museums for 19th century villas, or as sleepy villages for residents who have lost interest in the city’s future.
Tell that to the likes of the Grey Lynn Champagne Socialist Society set. These people are the worst - high up on the totem pole of virtue signaling but in reality are only really open to be associating with 'the poors' on their own terms. They don't want necessarily them mingling around the entrance of the gourmet food store or the trendy cafe.
As for the Franklin Rd Xmas lights, does anyone really care about this anymore? Better to have a festive light shows in public spaces where people can congregate and celebrate. With stands selling food and alcohol. It's demeaning to have people use Franklin Rd as a representation of class divide.
There's also a lot of facadism on Franklin Rd. Old villa is raised, new underground carpark, all timber removed back to frame, remove sections of frame, punch out back wall and add faux wooden archgola thing, add underground heating etc, replace with new replica wood. Resulting Disney land house somehow ticks the "heritage" box. But building some townhouses for younger families would be banned.
Did the author read what he wrote, or does he listen to what he says?
He calls for looser zoning rules, but not out. It's an oxymoron.
It is not just about having looser zoning rules up, but also how they are implemented, plus since the price of all housing is set at the fringe, then the choice is having affordable density or not affordable density. The fact Ockham can't sell at the price they need to; shows they are building unaffordable density.
Brown cannot complain about a new wastewater plant north of Auckland as it was his council that gave it consent for the subdivision.
And you only have to look at the WaterCare debarkel to see over 1/2 of Auckland has no excess capacity.
And thanking Ockham for have the sense to build where the little remaining capacity is, is bizarre. Do you really think that they would build where there was no capacity?
The City does not have the capacity in infrastructure within its upzoned density for all the land it has zoned
And you can be sure the house Brown lives in, is in a position so it cannot be built out by density.
And Seymour is upholding liberal views by his stance. The Author obviously does not understand what that means. Liberalism is not anarchy. It does not mean you can do whatever you want.
The people and neighbourhoods that Seymour is talking about is those owners in neighourhoods that agreed to build the way they did in accordance with all their wishes. Sometimes these build rules were in writing and sometimes just by verbal agreement. These were the forerunner of modern subdivision covenants, but without the legal protection (a person's word was their bond in those days). By acting as a community, they were helping safeguard their individual property rights.
However, when they handed over the running of their community to council, and as the city grew, then they having lost their individual community rights, to be replaced by the total city rights. 'Your sacrifice is for the greater good' trope.
In doing what they are doing, local Govt. have broken their social contract with their ratepayers. That's why no one trusts local Govt, because they are not true to their word.
There are far better mechanisms to increase density, and not break the social contract.
The fact Ockham can't sell at the price they need to; shows they are building unaffordable density.
The price points will represent what is necessary to generate ROI and ROE (effort). Despite their seemingly correct vision, they can't be in this game for charity.
Charity is a conscious effort to give something way when you could have sold it.
So, no surprises that they are not into that with all they build.
My point is that the reason we are being given for the density, is that it will make housing more affordable. This is a case in point in that it doesn't.
It's wrong just to think it's about increasing supply of smaller higher density in the city to make housing affordable.
On fact there is no correlation between density and affordability. If there was then Hong Kong would have the most affordable housing in the world, not the most unaffordable.
And Texas has the most affordable of everything, including higher density housing at about half the Auckland price, with their McMansions in the suburbs being the price of a small Auckland apartment
Depends on your definition of affordable. People love to complain about fuel costs, but don't seem to consider that when they choose to live miles from work. Then we collectively spend billions subsidising new roads for them.
Watercare has spent $1.6 billion on the central interceptor, it would make sense for new developments to be close to that.
My definition of affordable housing is not having to pay the non-valued added costs that are inherent in NZ housing so whatever typology of housing I wished to buy, including high density in the CBD, is more affordable and better value for money that it presently is.
Your definition is obviously different?
Its probably much the same. I'd allow anyone to build anything wherever they want, providing there is available infrastructure in place or the developer builds the infrastructure. But I don't see any developer paying to add a lane to the Southern Motorway for example, so we are left with density being the only option IMO.
They can still act like a community and not build anything...
But they have already built the community they want....
And they can keep it if that's what they want, no one will force them to do anything. We don't force them to drive Model T Fords because that's what the original community did.
But the rules have been changed, the social contract between and their council representatives has been broken, so that new owners without the same community intent can affect them.
Let that community have what they want, and other communities that want higher density, build there.
Couldn't you say the same thing about somewhere like Drury? Once a small country town that I'm sure the community loved is now loads of sprawl housing which they probably hate. Sounds like we shouldn't build anything anywhere, which is how we got into this mess.
I'm not saying no density, I'm saying the way they are doing is ham fisted. These managers/Mayors of the city have mismanaged the management of it.
If they had allowed up and out using the same cultural empathy and rules other affordable jurisdictions do, then you would get a lot more affordability on the fringe, which allow everything going in to be more affordable, and people would follow that in, if that is what they wanted.
Being forced to Drury on 428m2 sections for $820,000 is crazy. Might as well just go that bit further out and fly to Aussie.
These managers/Mayors of the city have mismanaged the management of it.
While true, stating this doesn't solve the underlying issue that there are wealthy inner city neighbourhoods that stand to lose what they like and have resourced to fight vs say less affluent neighbourhoods who may be less likely and well resourced to say no.
The council cannot please everybody, but everybody will pay for more roads, transport infrastructure if inner city density is not increased, and this is inequitable as those wealthy inner city suburbs are less impacted by contributing more for this vs where they want council to add density (not in their back yard). The majority need be prioritised for the long term productivity and viability off AKL, not a minority inner city group or two who wish to preserve their property prices.
No one, wealthy or not wants to have poorly planned density.
There is no reason why you cannot have density were agreed and leave those that don't out of it.
The right rules would allow more of a generation transition by developer amalgamation over time. Some subdivisions are already at this point and will naturally density with no ones social contract being broken.
The management being used at present is more akin to using a sledgehammer when a scalpel is more appropriate.
On the other hand Bishop is selling off KO housing in those wealthy suburbs specifically.
How about a referendum around immigration. No one voted for the last million that arrive, even the recent arrivals don't want more. But hay....lets not have democratic process get in the way of good property speculation.
not popular and is labelled racist
Referendums aren't it
Note even even discussed during election campaigns. That's the point.
Catch 22 there, as without the immigration we would be forced unreservedly to change pension settings sooner by necessity and it would be interesting to see what way the current pensioners would swing on this topic.
The inherent problem Auckland is that land and building on it costs too much, while apartments sell for too little. Meaning that apartments are unprofitable to build here. This reform merely will allow for more theoretical apartments to be built, but they are unprofitable to build so will remain theoretical.
However, Auckland does have one astounding advantage over every other city in the world - Auckland can now do infill sprawl! Auckland has a massive amount of greenfield land available that is closer to the city centre than the incredibly expensive sprawl it currently builds.
yeah i agree
WGTN people paying 5k rates and 5k for water... look rural young man
5k includes the water i believe based on friends of mine there, but not sure if this is different in Porirua vs WGT city.
It also doesn't help that so much of the apartment design is poor, and the developments are cookie cutter monocultres of minimum spec hutches for humans.
'It is a firm consensus across the political spectrum, shared by economists and planning professionals.'
Sorry, Dan, but you need to go deeper. Have any of them wondered how the future will play out in energy and resource terms? No, they have not. Google future cities, and there are just raves about 'renewable energy transitions'.
Which are not happening.
Cities are dissipative structures - they take energy and resources from? Somewhere else. Farmed acres, mined acres, sun-drenched acres. And this round of build won't happen for very long, nor will it be able to be maintained. Services? Pipes and diggers and fuel? Utes and copper and insulation materials? Food ex Haber Bosch? Delivered by?
Well before 2050, they will have been largely abandoned - solar acreage will have been the deciding factor; food-production acreage per head, and as little distance between the two as possible.
How about asking experts, Dan? Rather than 'across the political and economics spectrum'.
#71: Nate Hagens - Planning for 'The Great Simplification' of Cities
Yes, I also noticed him trying to validate his argument by finding others that think like him.
Hardly a consensus of which to validate your position.
When Einstein was told over 100 scientists thought his theory on relativity was wrong, he replied 'just one scientist with evidence would be enough.'
For cities to become abandoned "well before 2050" our energy density would need to fall from current levels to below that of the the early 1800s in 20 years. Seems unlikely.
Seems?
Run an exponential increase based on a finite resource, and 'seems'?
The exponential phase exists whilst the energy is still cheap. Exponential growth will not continue as prices become less affordable.
It will not continue past the point of peak supply-rate.
Irrespective of 'price'.
Excellent article, strong argument well presented. Auckland so needs better long term vision around housing and transport. Upcoming rail improvements provide huge opportunities for developing high density near stations for far easier, cheaper and cleaner commuting
Our elephantine prescriptive and proscriptive planning, where the default response from risk-averse authorities is 'no', has served us poorly and is adapting far too slowly to a changing world.
We have to allow creative solutions to evolve, and that will require changes that don't make local and central government the last person standing if things go south. Are we ready for a properly professional building industry?
2 million new houses at 2.6 per household, so population growth of 5.2 mio new people on a city of 1.5mio, so about 5.5% growth (compounded) over the next 30 years? 65000 houses a year?
Better get building!
Where are all the resources going to come from for such a feat?
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