National have committed to keeping most of the density rules they agreed to with Labour, with the tweak of giving councils a little more flexibility around where people can build up to three storeys. Overall a great move, and one that will hopefully have a downwards pressure on house prices.
They have also indicated they plan to build more state houses, as well.
This is one of my concerns: we shouldn’t be building on new land, we should be building up. But if left up to councils, do we really think this will happen? I took the central government stepping in to get many local councils to even consider medium density in the first place.
I’m also including under utilised land that can be cleared and redeveloped in the “available land” category.
Fair enough. There is definitely a lot of underutilized land which can be repurposed.
Where I live, there is limited land zoned for industrial, so it concentrates businesses to one or two areas. This isn’t a problem, but because of zoning it means this land can never be repurposed into housing. Not that we need it yet, when the CBD has plenty of buildings which could be turned into residential/retail dual use buildings, instead of half empty offices for things that could be done at home…