Government could send Auckland back to old housing plan

It’s back to the drawing board for city planners, with urban centres soon making the call on whether to eschew denser housing for greenfield development.

And in Auckland, it may mean a return to the eight-year old foundation of the unitary plan.

New rules mandating greater housing intensification will soon be left to local councils to decide if they want to opt-in, according to the new government’s 100-day plan.

The National-led government has promised that previously bipartisan rules allowing three homes of up to three storeys to be built in cities without resource consent will become voluntary for local authorities that zone immediately for 30 years of housing growth.

Housing Minister Chris Bishop has framed the option to turf the oft-maligned MDRS (medium density residential standards) as the carrot with which to get local government to undertake much residential zoning quickly, with the aim of increasing housing supply and affordability.

On the campaign trail, Bishop said any National-led government would “aggressively go for housing growth”, despite promising to change the legislation.

Thirty years worth of future housing would instead come from greenfield developments on the edge of town, as well as greater intensification along mass transit corridors.

It’s raised questions over the bureaucratic load of 30 years of zoning done at pace – especially if it needs to happen before central government decides in any specific case whether it will need to continue to impose the density rules.

When asked about when councils could expect the change, Bishop said the coalition Government’s 100-day plan commits to beginning work on the implementation of National’s housing policy and making the MDRS optional for councils.

“I am taking advice from officials on the delivery of these policies and will be making announcements in due course,” he said. “As a Government, we are committed to getting more houses built across New Zealand and have an ambitious policy agenda to achieve this.”

Auckland councillor Chris Darby, of the North Shore, said there were details yet to be made clear, but he had concerns about the “considerable expense that Auckland Council has gone to over the last two years, responding to what we thought was bipartisan legislation that would endure the carousel of governments.”

He said when directives came from Parliament, they were seldom paired with the additional funding needed for local government to implement them.

“Auckland Council and the ratepayers of Auckland foot the bill. It would currently run into the millions,” he said. “There’s high risk that a decent chunk of that expenditure will be wasted spend, as the former bipartisan direction is unpicked, another version is revealed and the council spend keeps growing.”

For some councils the cost may involve producing 30 years of zoning on the hoof.

But Albert-Eden-Puketāpapa councillor Christine Fletcher said that shouldn’t pose a problem for Auckland, which already had a unitary plan with 30 years of supply built in.

The Auckland Unitary Plan came in back in 2016 after three years of development and submissions.

Fletcher said when the government tried to bring in plan changes in 2020, a former commissioner on the plan called and asked if they realised the plan already had provision for 30 years of housing supply.

“That’s what took three years to get it done,” she said. “So going back to that doesn’t pose a threat to us. The biggest threat we’ve got is funding that infrastructure.”

And if housing is expedited in areas just outside the city, currently zoned as ‘future urban’, there would be plenty of new infrastructure needed.

Transport links to the quickly growing northwest of Auckland are a common topic of heated discussion among Auckland’s councillors, with questions over whether housing development around Huapai and Kumeu is served enough by bus and road links.

Darby said sprawling beyond city limits was a move that belongs to the 1960s.

“Sprawling at the edges into productive food basket land is not a 21^st Century-worthy move,” he said. “With sprawl comes an eternal motoring mortgage and the compounding cost of remoteness.”

While Darby was a proponent for intensification, he said the real challenge was for the Government to turn its gaze towards the quality as well as the quantity of new homes.

“A missing ingredient is the lack of design control that Auckland Council and other tier one cities have over density,” he said. “Mayor Phil Goff and I raised this before the Environment Select Committee. We saw our recommendations go informally to the sponsoring ministers from Labour and National, before being rebuffed.”

Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Wellington and Christchurch have all been designated tier one.

Darby said the introduction of national design standards for these cities would be a “good starter” for the new Government.