Raw sewage will not be
bubbling up onto the footpaths or into the Waitematā.
The reality is much less dramatic.
I spent my late 20s living in Auckland and know how special it is. It is New Zealand’s only truly international city. If our country wants to thrive on the world stage, Auckland must be allowed to grow.
Cities aren’t museums. Our streets should not be shrines to the past.
The greatest cities in the world grow over time, steadily and purposely. They grow so they can accommodate those who flock to them for their jobs, for their families, and for their lifestyles. Critically, they grow to deliver affordable housing to their populations.
Auckland’s housing is unaffordable. That is a fact. Young people today simply don’t have the same opportunity to get into the housing market as their parents did.
In just 2001, Auckland’s housing market was close to the widely accepted international standard of housing affordability, with the ratio of house prices and household incomes at 4.2 to 1. Now, the ratio is 7.6 to 1.
There are two ways to make housing more affordable – the first is to grow wages by growing the economy, and the second is to build more houses. And to build more houses, you have to plan for them.
Our Government has returned local decision-making to the council, so, for the most part, they can once again decide how and where housing growth should occur.
The new plan change process is a big step forward from what was happening before – known as Plan Change 78 (PC78) – which started in 2022.
House sales in Auckland’s Herne Bay could spike as a result of the new rules. Photo / Chris Tarpey
At this point, I want to apologise in advance for what will become a bit of an unavoidable acronym soup.
When I became a minister, the Auckland Council came to the Government wanting to withdraw from PC78 because it required the “Medium Density Residential Standards” (also known as the “MDRS”) all over Auckland. The MDRS was controversial. It was one size fits all – requiring blanket application across most areas of Auckland, as well as dictating the technical rules councils have to use for that density.
National campaigned on making the MDRS optional for councils, and we are delivering on this promise.
Auckland Council came to the Government with a proposal. If we let it withdraw from the MDRS as soon as possible, it would prepare a replacement plan change to densify around key transit routes and ensure housing capacity in the city didn’t take a backwards step.
Following the events of the 2023 Auckland floods, the council also wanted to “downzone” areas where there are significant risks from flooding and coastal inundation, to better protect Aucklanders from natural hazard risks.
Both the council and the Government are also keen to maximise the development opportunities from the $5.5 billion investment into the new City Rail Link, making sure lots of people can live near the stations that will benefit from much more regular trains.
So we agreed that Auckland would be free to abolish the MDRS, as long as it enables the housing capacity elsewhere in the city. For the most part, exactly where that capacity is located is over to the council, but it must allow more density around key stations that benefit from the City Rail Link.
This replacement plan change, still in draft, is now public.
In this draft replacement plan change, the Auckland Council has significantly reduced the number of properties zoned for three-storey homes, like the MDRS bluntly required.
The council has set different standards for the areas that have continued to be zoned for medium density, with settings better suited to an Auckland context.
The council has put in place stronger controls to protect Aucklanders from flooding, coastal hazards, landslides and wildfires.
However, the current council has a weird aversion to new greenfield housing – big new subdivisions on the city fringe.
I am in favour of new greenfield housing, where the infrastructure costs can be recovered from new residents – and in my view the council should be zoning more for this sort of housing. The new draft plan is a missed opportunity, but it is a draft – and the council has a chance to improve it.
What about the “target” of “two million houses”? It doesn’t exist.
This gets pretty technical, but in its previous plan change (alongside what was already in the Unitary Plan), Auckland was enabling around two million homes in total across Auckland over the next few decades. This new draft plan change carries this same number across, to ensure that housing capacity in Auckland doesn’t take a backwards step.
The key word above is “enabled”.
The Auckland Unitary Plan “enabled” around a million homes. Almost 10 years later, only around 10% of that enabled capacity has actually turned into new housing. The idea that a plan change that enables two million homes is suddenly going to result in two million homes being built in the short term is, frankly, nuts.
Housing capacity does not immediately mean construction. It means the ability to do it, and it means infrastructure can be sequenced and co-ordinated to support it. I expect that the housing capacity the Auckland Council is enabling through this new plan change will support Auckland’s growth over the next 30 to 50 years.
Auckland Council, as well as the Government, does not want housing capacity in Auckland to go backwards. It is an indisputable fact that more housing leads to more affordable housing. I hope that’s what we all want for Auckland.
What about character homes and neighbourhoods? It is true that the new draft plan removes some character protections, but any suggestion that there has been a wholesale scrapping of character rules is not borne out by the facts. The new draft plan change retains character protections in vast swathes of Auckland.
PC78 would have applied special character protections to 16,090 properties; the new draft plan proposes to reduce that to 15,357 – a reduction of just 4.56%.
The new plan is a draft – it is not even a final draft. There is still a long way to go before this plan is finalised.
Auckland Council will release a final draft plan in September, and then if it decides to proceed, there will be opportunities for public input to the process. I encourage Aucklanders to have their say.
At the end of the day, the new draft plan reflects what the Auckland Council asked for, and puts Auckland back in charge of deciding where it wants new housing. More housing – particularly in the areas that make sense, like near train stations – will mean a more affordable Auckland.
Don’t let people who should know better tell you otherwise.
Chris Bishop is the Minister of Housing, Transport, Infrastructure and RMA Reform.