85-year-old battles high-rise takeover

Jean Revill. Photo / Steven McNicholl

An 85-year-old Takapuna campaigner is taking on the Super City over its plan for high-density living in her neighbourhood.

Jean Revill is protesting at plans to split the metropolitan centre into seven precincts for handling growth, saying she faces the prospect of passing walls of eight-storey apartment blocks on her 10-minute walk from home to the shops.

"They will stuff up the very friendly community I live in," she said. "I meet young people all the time who are renting homes and we talk but if they lived eight storeys up I would not get to know them."

Although big changes in the neighbourhood might be a decade away, she said: "You have to make a stand and fight."

A North Shore resident for 40 years, Mrs Revill has lived in her unit for a decade in an area of mostly single-level homes between Lake Pupuke and the CBD. But this area, dubbed the Anzac St West Precinct, is changing.

Her nearest neighbour lost her view to Auckland City when a three-storey apartment block went up across the road.

Mrs Revill told a planning commissioners panel they should heed the mayor's move to soften his Auckland Plan regional target for new homes from 300,000 to 280,000 or 260,000 in the next three decades.

She was one of 38 who made submissions to the panel, some of them property owners calling for higher buildings and making the area more attractive to developers.

Devonport-Takapuna Local Board chairman Chris Darby said the district plan change for Anzac St West Precinct was notified in October 2010 and had been widely discussed.