Manukau housing: Questions over land ownership

Potential Manukau site, 1.4ha, near the local shopping centre, schools and train station. Photo / Screengrab

Government plans to fill vacant Crown land with houses are being lambasted by Labour as a fiasco after one of four would-be Auckland sites turned out to be largely council-owned.

A two-hectare site in central Manukau which Building and Housing Minister Nick Smith highlighted to journalists and developers two weeks ago as ripe for terraced housing is only 80 per cent owned by the Government, his office has acknowledged.

Although the area is larger than a previous estimate by the minister of 1.4ha, the Government owns little more than 0.2ha between Manukau's new railway station and the Southwestern Motorway.

Auckland Deputy Mayor Penny Hulse is also under-whelmed by the Government's ambition to build 60 terraced houses on it, saying it is part of a metropolitan centre and far too valuable to be restricted to residential development.

She told the Herald this morning ((Thurs)) that although the council was prepared to work with the Government on developing the land, it should support a mix of offices, shops and apartments.

"There's no way you would put terraced housing in a city centre like that," she said, adding that the council's proposed unitary plan would allow 18-storey buildings to a height of 72 metres.

That compares with seven storeys she said the Government had set as the maximum for special housing areas (SHAs).

Opposition housing spokesman Phil Twyford said Labour had never criticised the principle of scouting out surplus Crown land for new homes.

"It's a no-brainer and they should have done it seven years ago," he said this afternoon.
"But Nick Smith's execution has been abysmal. It's clear he didn't do his homework and everything he touches seems to turn to dust."

Mr Twyford said that since Dr Smith promised in the Budget to allocate 500ha of surplus Crown land across Auckland for potential new homes, he had been able to point to only 30ha.

"Now it turns out that [of] one of those sites, the Government only owns ten per cent of the land."

That, on top of Ngati Whatua's indication of possible legal action against the Government's decision not to grant it a right of first refusal to buy surplus Crown land, spelt "a complete and utter fiasco."

A spokeswoman for Dr Smith said the Manukau ownership discovery did not alter the land's housing potential.

"The key information remains that it is publicly-owned land suitable for housing, and both the council and the Government remain committed to it being used for that purpose," she said, without referring to Ms Hulse's preference for mixed-use development..

"The announcement at the time was that it was a potential site, and that further work needed to be done."

She said there were three possibilities for the site - a potential joint development by the council and the Government, or either of the two parties buying the balance of land it did not already own.

Ms Hulse said it was important to make the best use of the land, even though it was "a bit of an island" between the motorway and Wiri Station Rd.

"We're saying to the Government, you need to be really clear we are not prepared to see important pieces of land in city centre hollowed out with terraced housing just to rush the job," she said.

"There's no point rushing to put 60 units on the site when you could actually get really good commercial development with commercial yield, plus a lot of well-designed, well-built apartments right next to the railway station."

Ms Hulse said the council had agreed to support SHAs outside city centres with potential to host 45,000 dwellings, "so we're hardly dragging the chain."