Bryan Gould: City's growing pains likely to continue

The coast is a preferred place to live not just for the retired, but for many different folks. Photo/File

We all know that Tauranga has been through a period of fast growth - welcome to some but, with its attendant problems of traffic congestion, soaring house prices and homelessness - not so welcome to others. But what has caused it and is it likely to continue?

The growth of the port and the buoyancy of the local economy have of course been factors. And many will suppose that the latest growth burst is a direct function of the exodus of Aucklanders in search of lower housing prices - but Tauranga's longer-term growth trajectory owes more to long-term factors than to short-term variations in the housing market.

To understand fully what has happened and could happen in future, we need to look further afield and across a longer period of time. The story starts with the European settlement of distant lands centuries ago. Those early European settlers, and particularly the British, were hugely impressed by what they found, but what they sought most of all, initially at least, were living conditions that replicated as nearly as possible what they had left behind.

So, in North America, the early pilgrims settled in the North, in what they called New England, rather than in the warmer climes of the south.

In Australia, the chosen areas for settlement were in the south, in Victoria and southern New South Wales, rather than further north in the hotter temperatures of Queensland and the Northern Territories.

It was the same story, at least in part, in New Zealand. For many English settlers, the ideal spot was Christchurch and its surrounds while, for the Scots, Dunedin - the Edinburgh of the south - was the preferred destination. The relatively cooler temperatures to be found in these places were comfortingly familiar.

But this early pattern of settlement eventually began to change. I am no demographer, but the trend over recent decades to move away from cooler to warmer temperatures is surely unmistakable.

In the US, it has meant a steady shift of population towards the south, led first by retired people looking to avoid harsh winters and wanting to spend less of reduced incomes on heating. They were then followed by the holidaymakers, seeking to spend their leisure time in the sunshine and on the beaches.

In Australia, the drift has been not to the south but to the north - again, to where the sun shines more often and more warmly. Queensland has been the recipient of considerable migration from other parts of Australia. And, in New Zealand, similar though perhaps less evident factors have been at work.

Trends like these have been stimulated by possibly two factors. First, the British settlers, some of whom - according to the possibly apocryphal story - initially continued for some time to build houses facing south for the sun, eventually began to acclimatise and to adapt to living in the Southern Hemisphere.

Memories of home (and of its perhaps doubtful wintry pleasures) faded and the benefits of warmth and sunshine - and living at the beach - became more apparent. And second- and third-generation settlers began to feel more able to tolerate, and to enjoy, the higher temperatures.

The second factor has been recent and technological rather than biological or cultural. It has been the development and affordability of air-conditioning that has allowed people to take advantage of warmer winters while avoiding the heat and humidity in the summer that would otherwise have deterred them from moving to hotter climes. This factor will of course have been more significant in Queensland or Florida than in the Bay of Plenty, but it will still have played a part.

Whatever the reason, the drift of population growth in temperate countries towards warmer areas has been under way for a considerable time and is not likely to stop any time soon - either in the Bay of Plenty or elsewhere.

Population growth in Tauranga, as in similar climes overseas, was historically led by the retired, looking for the sun, but is now a phenomenon extending across the whole of society.

Tauranga, like Cairns or Miami, had better get used to it - and plan for it. The inflow of new residents brings benefits as well as headaches. We need to maximise the former and ensure solutions for the latter.

Bryan Gould is a former British MP and Waikato University vice-chancellor.