Housing Minister Chris Bishop has told real estate agents that the government wants to “flood the market” with opportunities for housing development.
It has agreed to a range of changes that would free up land for housing, and, the government hopes, make housing more affordable.
My rough summary of proposal:
- Most cities will be required to have zoned enough land for 30 years of housing demand all the time
- These cities won’t be allowed to determine urban/rural boundaries
- Must intensify, especially around major public transport routes. If they decide not to for character reasons, then equivalent capacity must be opened up in another area
- cafes, dairies, etc (mixed use) must be allowed in residential areas
- appartments not allowed to have minimum floor area or requirement for balcony set by council
- councils already intensifying under a previous agreement (MDRS) will keep this, but if they change it then they have to move to using new rules
Let me know if I’ve got something wrong!
The really big issue, especially with the prioritisation of development on the outskirts of the current urban areas, is that councils cannot afford the infrastructure costs to serve these new homes.
I’ll refer to a live Auckland example that I know well. The Supporting Growth programme, led by NZTA and Auckland Transport, has been planning the necessary transport corridors for the next 30 odd years of housing development. The aim is to protect these corridors so that they don’t get built out thus reducing future construction costs, and to give developers clear signals about where the government agencies will invest and in what order.
They are currently submitting notices of requirement. This creates present day property liabilities. There is, however, not enough money to meet the required property purchases and this is completely undeveloped land that we are talking about. The remaining land will be even more expensive in the future. There absolutely will not be enough money in the future to actually build all of the transport infrastructure without some significant funding regime changes, and this is just one example, in Auckland, for transport. It is compounded across all of the high growth urban areas and other horizontal infrastructure like the 3 waters.
So far I’ve only talked about the pure financial cost, but there are other economics costs due to the increase in car travel that will occur. More deaths and serious injuries, higher levels of congestion, increased greenhouse gas and other pollution emissions, etc.
There is a reason that so many professions have been calling for greater intensification and the MDRS, while it wasn’t perfect, was a much better solution AND was originally bi-partisan.
This does include forcing the councils to allow greater intensification of housing, but yeah, more sprawl is on the horizon.
With it being difficult for councils to support the new developments on the outskirts, what’s to stop the council saying those rates are twice as high?
Sprawl has so many extra costs too particularly around transportation. Given council budgets are already severely pressured its hard not to pre-judge that there’ll be at the least a decrease to overall public transport by dilution if not just no services in some areas. So more traffic on local roads which means more emissions and more cost on councils maintaining roads for more cars.
This might be something for the next government to build on. More housing (in the right places) is definitely something the country needs, and this government has made it clear they won’t invest in infrastructure (other than roads). Changes will take a while to have an effect, with luck maybe we will have a new government with a plan to build better infrastructure.
Doesn’t that intensification policy come with a huge out in the form of councils just saying that intensification will destroy the area’s ‘character’?
One of the conditions is that they have to provide equivalent elsewhere if they to pull that card. I’d guess the devil is in the detail.
I’m just wondering what that elsewhere entails. If they aren’t strict about it I could imagine councils just pointing to land far away from anything and saying ‘see we provided an alternative’.
Yeah for sure. Not much point in intensifying transport corridors if you’re just gonna transfer that intensification zoning to the outskirts.