The response was, to put it euphemistically, sceptical<\/a>. But Bishop was mostly vindicated. Wellington and Christchurch passed ambitious housing plans under his new rules. In Auckland, the council used the flexibility National offered to reduce housing capacity on flood plains and put it closer to train stations and bus routes in its proposed zoning document, Plan Change 120.<\/p>\n In his speech to the Committee for Auckland at the New Zealand International Convention Centre on Thursday, Bishop couldn\u2019t muster the same brave face. He was there to announce another last-minute housing backtrack and this time there was no getting around it, it was a downgrade. He was scaling Plan Change 120 back to allow fewer houses. It had enabled two million. He was allowing the council to take that down to 1.6 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n The changes were a concession to a protest campaign Bishop had rubbished repeatedly. He\u2019d tried to explain that enabling two million homes wasn\u2019t the same as building them, that the figure would only be reached in the astronomically unlikely event of every section in the city being developed to its maximum capacity, but the discontent kept growing. \u201cThe 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,\u201d he wrote desperately in a Herald op-ed in September<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Unfortunately for him, it turned out some of the nutters were stationed around the cabinet table. Prime minister Christopher Luxon, egged on by Pakuranga\u2019s Simeon Brown and Epsom\u2019s David Seymour, insisted Bishop cut the two million capacity figure in deference to the howls of anguish that could still be heard emanating day and night out of public meetings in Parnell<\/a> and Botany<\/a>.<\/p>\n On Thursday, Bishop oscillated between snippy and reflective over what Labour described as his \u201chumiliating backdown\u201d. Asked by TVNZ reporter turned Infrastructure NZ engagement manager Katie Bradford why misinformation around the two million figure had been so pervasive, he sniped \u201cI don\u2019t know, you used to be in the media, you know more than I do\u201d. At a media standup a few minutes later, he was more conciliatory. \u201cPolitics is always all about compromise on the way through, and this is a good step forward,\u201d he noted, as Auckland mayor Wayne Brown watched on from among the reporters like a perched vulture. \u201cIt\u2019s a more politically sustainable plan, and that is important.\u201d<\/p>\n If Bishop was philosophical about the change, it may have been because he secretly thought he had his opponents snookered again. Despite cutting the housing capacity across Auckland as a whole, he\u2019d kept in place rules requiring council to focus its upzoning around train stations and town centres. The places with the best infrastructure would still be the first priority for housing.\u00a0<\/p>\n Unfortunately for some of the loudest voices protesting Plan Change 120, that\u2019s exactly where they live<\/a>. Epsom is home to four train stations. Mt Eden<\/a> has a huge new City Rail Link station. Kingsland has rapid bus routes and a train station. St Mary\u2019s Bay is within the walking catchment of the city centre. So are parts of Ponsonby. Auckland Council can\u2019t just build a massive garbage compactor to keep compressing human bodies into Te Atat\u016b peninsula<\/a>. Even under this new, watered down plan, it\u2019s going to have to put houses in the richer suburbs it\u2019s previously shielded from development through innovative, legally questionable planning practices<\/a>.<\/p>\n Perhaps realising this, Epsom MP David Seymour sent out a press release during Bishop\u2019s speech insisting the council would have to give cabinet an outline of where it\u2019s going to put its 1.6 million houses before any law changes are passed. Wayne Brown was having none of it. Speaking to The Spinoff after Bishop\u2019s speech, he said he\u2019d rather just keep the existing plan than submit a new one to be signed off by \u201ca bunch of turkeys that don\u2019t live in Auckland\u201d. \u201cI\u2019m not interested in doing that. We\u2019ll just stick with the two million houses,\u201d he said, before adding a barb for Seymour. \u201cMost of those will be in Epsom.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Brown could later be heard loudly calling the Act leader an unrepeatable epithet on the footpath outside the convention centre. His idea of turning Epsom into Shanghai may have been a joke, but there was some substance at its heart. The mayor was insistent that, even if the council ends up reducing the capacity in Plan Change 120 down from two million houses, he wasn\u2019t going to be taking that out of the inner suburbs where the council has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on water infrastructure and transport connections<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s where we\u2019ve got everything,\u201d he explained, with a note of exasperation in his voice. His planning committee chair Richard Hills reiterated that later. \u201cThe plan was built on your proximity to things like jobs, transport and infrastructure,\u201d he said. \u201cBased on the plan we built, you\u2019d have to work backwards and start with reducing capacity in the outer suburbs where it makes less sense to have density.\u201d<\/p>\n If Hills had to guess, that means places like Howick, Pakuranga and parts of west Auckland will lose some development capacity. It\u2019s less likely to mean the complaining masses filling up halls in Parnell will be able to avoid having to look at an apartment. Yesterday\u2019s announcement was a hollow victory for those Epsomites. They helped get rid of the big bad scary number, two million. But as Bishop kept trying to tell them, that number wasn\u2019t real. What matters more is where development is allowed, and as things stand, it\u2019s still set to be allowed in their backyard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Auckland\u2019s grumbling inner suburbs got the housing cuts they wanted. They may be disappointed by what comes next.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[96158,82265,5782,492,111,43,139,69,2114,96160,135,18130],"class_list":{"0":"post-295199","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-auckland-housing","9":"tag-chris-bishop","10":"tag-comments","11":"tag-comments-enabled","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-opinion","17":"tag-plan-change-120","18":"tag-politics","19":"tag-wayne-brown"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Chris Bishop announces the government\u2019s housing backtrack (Photo: Hayden Donnell)<\/p>\n
Auckland mayor Wayne Brown talks to media<\/p>\n