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.
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