Take a look at Google Maps and you'll see the sections in New Windsor are massive. 1000 square metres is common. Stuck on these vast tracts of land are single houses. Sometimes just three bedrooms but there are quite a few five-bedroom monsters. The fact is only 6000 people live in the two square kilometres of New Windsor. There's room to swing an elephant or to park five cars off-street.
Now, while you're on Google Maps take a look at where New Windsor is. Firstly, it's only 10km from town. But the big thing going for New Windsor is the Southwestern Motorway. A quick trip down Maioro St and you're on the fast track to your work in Penrose, the airport and even Manukau City.
When Alice finishes her work under Waterview, New Windsor will have a motorway straight into town or out west right on its doorstep. Beat that, Meadowbank. The fact is that New Windsor has always been prime real estate but planners over the last half century allowed it to be developed as though it was Pukekohe. Once places like New Windsor and Waterview were wastefully full they just gobbled up more land on the edges of our city.
Auckland has been profligate in its use of land. No one has looked at how things would change in 50 to 100 years' time. While letting the city sprawl through Pakuranga and the Shore in the 60s, they let land in the golden 15km circle around the CBD develop like topsy.
It amazes me to see the high density developments in Botany Downs and Hobsonville, miles out of town, yet land on the isthmus is as sparsely populated as a town in the South Island. Mike Lee and the old Auckland Regional Council could see that which is why they ring fenced the city. I've read recently that this policy is being blamed in part for our astonishing house prices. That's balderdash. Surely our planners and developers should have seen the opportunities that were sitting right in front of their faces decades ago.
The good folk of Remuera and Newmarket saw that. Growing up in Remuera I've watched the apartments develop along Remuera Rd and then be snapped up by the empty nesters to let their children have the opportunity to buy the family house in their home suburb.
For every nuclear family of four living in one house, eventually three houses will be needed to house them. It's happening in the central west as well. Finally people have seen that Great North Rd could be a boulevard of city living and not a wasteland of car yards.
The unitary plan has its faults but at its heart is the ability for us to imagine our city in the way we should have 50 years ago. We are a collection of villages with no heart because the people are so spread out. We're the capital of suburban isolation dependent on the car. Some intensive development around the Sandringhams and Papatoetoes of this town will bring them to life. Avondale/New Lynn is a sleeping giant.
The call to open up even more land on the outskirts is an attempt to keep the quarter acre pavlova paradise alive and well in Auckland. Those days are gone. Nothing against Huapai if you work locally, but if I had to live that far out I'd move to Napier.
In the market of today I'm hoping the demand will inspire an imaginative solution of supply.
One that will see a city we can be proud of and live in easily in 50 or 100 years.
