Bishop’s high growth targets for Auckland are extortionately inflated.
They position our unique isthmus to be obliterated, our maunga surrounded by towers and cookie-cutter urban landscapes.
Worryingly, many high-profile Auckland councillors seem to acquiesce to Bishop’s steamroller “fix” from Lower Hutt.
Maybe the strict confidentiality of Minister and Mayoral negotiations has something to do with it. Maybe not.
Despite Mayor Brown’s energy to ‘fix’ things, Auckland has not been dragging its heels on any broader growth agenda.
Our GDP ($160b) eclipses the Wellington region ($43b) and other centres, as it should. Auckland should be planned by Auckland councillors and local boards for Aucklanders, not by Lower Hutt and Wellington housing idealists like Bishop.
The Auckland unitary plan enabled around 900,000 residential dwellings to easily serve many decades of projected growth, noting our demographic is ageing and our population growth is slowing.
More folks will likely fall out of the housing market than enter it in a few decades, freeing up property more than projected.
But Bishop now mandates our plan has a residential capacity of about two million feasible dwellings, in a city that builds between 10,000-20,000 dwellings a year, according to the council’s chief economist.
About 34,000 homes were built in New Zealand last year.
Even building in Auckland at the higher 20,000 residential dwellings per annum rate, Bishop’s growth mandate for our city imposes residential supply for the next 100 years.
It is a complete distortion of the key problem statement.
Freeing up land supply using high growth scenario projections is excessive and does not adequately reflect that the key constraint to developable capacity is infrastructure.
Housing affordability is due to income constraints that won’t change, no matter how well you over-supply the market with stock.
Changes to the City Centre zone, resulting from the council recently accepting the Independent Hearing Panel’s recommendation, mean our City Centre floorspace capacity increases nearly fourfold, from around 5 million sq m to 19,242,000sq m, with an estimated 38% of that for housing.
Allowing a generous 70sq m for an average central city apartment equates to about 103,000 new apartments in the city centre. One wonders how many will be owned by investors serving a tenant population for whom affordability is either unattainable or undesirable.
Bishop’s demand-based growth targets create a strong risk of oversupply and over-investment, ruining character areas in the process. His prescriptive RMA amendments are blunt and disproportionate, spawning intended consequences without quality.
Bishop will be the political bully historians recall for destroying Auckland’s character residential areas, heritage, and ending the coast-to-volcanic viewshaft amenity our city has prided itself on in a vain, misdirected mission far-removed from addressing the problem statement.
His Government’s current growth mandate perpetuates the sad, exaggerated belief that there are “unnecessary planning barriers for urban development”. That’s largely because our planning system has become predicated on massive debt-funded housing development.
(Developer debt recovery and margin expectations are yet further reasons why housing affordability won’t be solved by supply saturation).
That platform helps developer lobbyists amplify how every little process step becomes “red tape” or a burdensome cost to be mitigated. The pugilistic solution is to fast-track and disable communities of interest.
Most planning consents get processed without the scrutiny of notification. Housing developers take advantage of pre-lodgment meetings with council planners to ease “more than minor” effects issues in often infringing proposals that could snag them with a “barrier” such as public scrutiny and concern for cumulative, quality urban outcomes.
Zoning is the mechanism that shapes where housing is built and what it looks like. But the rate of building activity is set by market forces, not zones.
Auckland is already supporting intensification to serve the actual problem through significant changes to the Unitary Plan. The council is supporting further intensification through corridors, and additional flexibility for expanded non-residential activities in residential zones.
Bishop at least had the sense to see that the council should be able to opt out of the awful MDRS (Medium Density Residential Standards). But there is no need for Bishop to impose such excessive new “offsetting” capacity requirements on the council when opting out.
Aucklanders should be very concerned about the excessive housing capacity Bishop is mandating. Our suburban and cultural diversity is on the brink of an oppressive, politically-imposed collapse.
