900 homes for Matapihi?

Matapihi Peninsula could become home to another 900 families under planning options being floated by Tauranga City Council for the city's peaceful rural heartland.
The largely Maori-owned peninsula has become the focus of a study that seeks to increase the housing potential of Matapihi without compromising its rural character.
A report which tries to define development options has just been released by the council and follows consultation with Maori and European residents through a series of community workshops.
The Matapihi land use options report lists eight scenarios, ranging from achieving 250 new homes by sticking with the status quo, to 900 new homes by allowing rural-styled ribbon development along all the peninsula's roads.
This most intensive development option envisaged one house per 1500sq m section, and a 135m deep development zone back from roadsides.
The report said this option was favoured by the workshops as it generated the ability to build more houses on almost all sites and was regarded as equitable.
But the counter-argument was that inner Matapihi would eventually have a residential flavour _ albeit on a low density scale.
A variation on this theme was to largely keep development out of the main orchard blocks _ reducing potential new homes to 550.
Another option on the same theme sought to protect even more of Matapihi's highly productive soils by reducing the development depth to 70m along roadsides, generating 340 new homes. This reduced housing to one deep from roads, rather than the two deep permitted by a 135m wide development strip.
A different option was to allow further development in the five existing rural-residential housing clusters. Two of these were located around Matapihi's two marae. This option opened up 400 new development opportunities _ 250 houses within the clusters and 150 outside the clusters.
Limited growth above the status quo could be achieved by increasing the number of houses permitted in marae community zones from 30 to 50.
A key development issue raised by Maori was the desire to construct papakainga housing _ housing on ancestral lands. Essentially, small housing clusters could be located on blocks that protected the rural character of the surrounding area.
Hemi Rolleston, of Matapihi's Ngati Tapu hapu, said that based on his limited discussions of the report, none of the options stood out as the preferred solution.
"Not one is sufficient from a Maori perspective."
He saw the answer as being a bit of a combination of options. And while it might be convenient to be close to the road for services, the best sites were those with views closer to the water.
The bottom line for him was to retain land in Maori ownership _ that was why Maori liked the Papakainga, marae community zones and hapu partition housing development options.
"Each of these retained Maori ownership and protected the land to a large extent. We can control our development and it will still be rural."
Mr Rolleston said Maori land ownership meant Matapihi had its own protective mechanism. If Maori had more money, there would be more new houses on Matapihi now, although not many more.