It looks like we might finally be letting people build houses in Kingsland, Mt Eden and Mt Albert, and some of our councillors are absolutely ropeable.
A fug of grumpiness hung heavy in the air from the first minutes of Auckland Council’s planning committee meeting on Thursday. Its chair, North Shore councillor Richard Hills, was trying to kick off an introductory presentation from staff on a set of new housing rules proposed for the city, and questions from the floor were already piling up. Albany’s John Watson had dug up a speech from housing minister Chris Bishop where he’d promised communities would decide on the future of their suburbs. “What did he mean by that?” he asked, pointedly. “We can’t speak for the minister,” replied Hills. Waitematā’s Mike Lee was, if anything, more disgruntled. He wore an expression similar to that of the crotchety hobbit from the first Lord of the Rings film as he listed similar concerns about consultation. “We’ll just go now to John for the presentation,” said Hills.
Mike Lee, left, and Everard Proudfoot from Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
It was just the start. Lee and his compatriots had come to the committee to kick up a fuss. The plan they were there to discuss would, at long last, allow people to build apartments and townhouses near the majority of Auckland’s train stations and rapid busways. The city’s current Unitary Plan allows for 900,000 houses, but enshrines 41% of the land within 5km of the city centre under special character rules which essentially forbid development. This new one would enable two million homes, including 10-storey apartments near public transit in previously off-limits “leafy suburbs” like Mt Eden, Kingsland and Mt Albert. It’s been foisted on the council by the government, which has grown frustrated with local authorities building bilge pumps, aqueducts and municipal pipe systems purely to transport the piss when it comes to housing.
But some councillors weren’t going to let those elaborate systems be demolished without a fight. Lee led the charge. He railed against Bishop over the changes, enigmatically arguing that extending what people can do by right on their property will destroy their property rights. “We have a minister who talks about property rights. What he seems to be talking about is property developer rights,” he thundered. “Not the property rights of ordinary citizens who he seems to be issuing directives to change their neighbourhoods and the value and amenity of their homes.”
The criticisms kept coming. Albany councillor Wayne Walker delivered a series of speeches, which he cleverly disguised as questions to council staff. In one of them, he appeared to argue that because upzoning can increase the value of people’s properties, everyday home buyers will be priced out of the market. “It will be attractive to a developer but not to an ordinary person buying a house,” he said, while curiously omitting what developers build and who they sell it to.
He got support from his Albany compatriot, with Watson noting that in his ward, developers often buy a house for $1.4 or $1.5 million, then build several houses that sell for $1.2 or $1.3 million. “There’s no effective advancement,” he said. If he was troubled by the fact affordability improved even in his example of how upzoning doesn’t improve affordability, he didn’t let on.
At some point in all this, Houkura member Tau Henare appeared to lose the will to live. “Should I ask my next question?” asked Walker, after one of Hills’ attempts to cut him off. “Oh, if you must,” muttered Henare under his breath. Several councillors would later inform The Spinoff the interjection was relatively tame by his standards, and others have included more swear words.
Tau Henare plumbs new depths of misery at Auckland Council’s planning committee (Photo: Hayden Donnell)
Most of all, these naysayers argued about infrastructure. “Ultimately you can’t do all this upzoning without making the commitment to provide the infrastructure that will support it,” Albert-Eden-Puketāpapa ward councillor Christine Fletcher, in comments echoed by several of her anti-upzoning allies. Council staff seemed confused. The entire point of this plan was to make sure housing was near infrastructure. It zones for apartments right by bus stations and train stations. That’s kind of the whole point. They tried saying as much, in terms as dry and bureaucratic as possible, but the message never seemed to get through.
They didn’t have a hope. Walker, Lee, Fletcher and Watson would all rather stick with the Unitary Plan, and no one could talk them into anything else. But when the Unitary Plan was being debated, they didn’t much like that either. They don’t want apartments in central areas. But when the council considers sprawl, they say no to that as well. The only viable conclusion is they want to house Auckland’s expanding population in a nonmaterial shadow realm accessible only through quantum.
Either that, or they just don’t want more people at all. At least Mike Lee was honest about that. In his closing speech, he said the plan was all about enabling a “so-called population of probably 7.5 million”. For him, the real solution appeared to be to simply not allow that “population” to come here. “One has to ask where will this population come from? Because it’s not coming from natural reproduction here. So what is the big plan here and who asked permission to radically change our country so much? Who gave Mr Bishop permission to do this? Certainly not the people of Auckland, to my knowledge,” he said.
Fletcher got close to the truth as well. She said allowing two million houses was simply too much, calling it a “dead rat” the council had to swallow. But housing isn’t a dead rat. It’s a place people live, and we’ve had too little of it for too long thanks to us having the same dead-end arguments decade after decade. In his closing speech on the new plan, Waitākere councillor Shane Henderson decried “decades of shameful planning decisions” that “left us in a huge hole”. “The Unitary Plan was our first step out of that hole,” he said. “And here is another step.”
Though some loudly spent the day imploring us to go back to the hole, where it’s safe and dark, most of his colleagues were willing to take that step toward the light. They agreed to put the plan out for consultation with local boards and iwi, with only Watson and Lee voting against the move. But the battle is far from over. As councillors filed out, they said this was just a warm-up. The next meeting on the plan is scheduled for September 24, when council will decide whether or not to actually endorse its broad and ambitious agenda. That’s when the real complaining will begin.