Auckland affordable housing scheme a 'dismal failure', councillor says

Chris Darby says the accord has failed. Photo / Greg Bowker

A senior Auckland councillor has called the city's affordable housing scheme a "dismal failure", claiming it has delivered fewer than 100 affordable homes.

Planning committee chairman Chris Darby said the Auckland Housing Accord between the Government and Auckland Council had not worked and he says the council should take some share of the blame.

Instead of delivering thousands of affordable new residences, only 98 free market -
as opposed to social housing - affordable Auckland homes had been delivered since the accord was struck, Darby said today.

"A dismal failure - that's how I would put it. We need to be pretty blunt about this. This is the accord that Aucklanders relied upon from 2013 and here we are four years later. I think it's fair to say that the accord has successfully increased supply of consentable sites but it had a second key purpose and that was to improve affordability and on that note, it has failed," he told RNZ National this morning.

The accord set a target to consent new Auckland sites for 39,000 residences and Darby said that by May this year, 47,000 dwelling sites had been approved.

But the accord had a target that 10 per cent of the 39,000 target would be affordable and he said the numbers had fallen far short of that.

"We all have to share responsibility - Government and council - for not keeping a track on the second key purpose of the accord, which was to improve affordability," Darby said.

"It's council's job to track the numbers then we convey that to the government ministry and then it's for the minister to release that data. We were tracking those numbers. But in terms of affordability, we have not - jointly - addressed that issue at all.

"We've seen the median Auckland house price go from $530,000 to $817,000 in the period of the accord. That's a 50 per cent increase in the median Auckland house price," he told RNZ National.