RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop, flanked by Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown and Minister for Auckland Simeon Brown: Agreement on the scope of a new housing density deal for the city has been reached. Photo / NZME
This is a transcript of Simon Wilson’s weekly newsletter Love this City – exploring the ideas and events, the reality and the potential of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
There will always be arguments about housing. And I like to think there will always be politicians trying to find the right way to build the houses we need.
The latest attempt landed this week, from the Minister for RMA Reform, Chris Bishop, and the Minister for Auckland, Simeon Brown. But before we get to it, let’s just back up a little.
Remember 2021? That was the year the Labour Government and National Opposition announced a cross-party housing accord. It had a noble goal: to take politics out of the planning for greater density in our big cities.
It also had a controversial result: the Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS), which for many people allowed far too much density, especially when it might be right next to their own villas.
Properties could be divided in three, and on each third, a three-storey dwelling could be built.
The cross-party accord didn’t make it to the next election, with National walking away from it in 2023, but in the way of statutory regulations, the MDRS have lingered on.
That’s all over now. Bishop and Brown have jointly announced that the Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Bill is back from select committee hearings. A boring name, but this is big. The bill is “significantly changed” from its original draft and will become law within a month or two.
Although the MDRS will be gone, greater density is still coming to Auckland. The ministers call it “city shaping” and say their aim is to “fully harness the economic growth benefits of the new City Rail Link”.
So, instead of allowing three-storey townhouses almost everywhere that wasn’t designated “special character” or “heritage”, the focus will be on transit corridors.
Bishop has been working closely on this with Mayor Wayne Brown and his Policy and Planning Committee chair, councillor Richard Hills.
The idea driving the minister has always been plain. “It doesn’t make sense that we have single-storey houses on quarter-acre sections a stone’s throw away from stations that, in a year or so, will see trains every few minutes,” he said on Wednesday.
The Character Coalition, which lobbies to preserve villa suburbs, has responded to this today, saying there are almost no “quarter-acre” of the kind Bishop describes.
Fair point, he exaggerates. But his basic point remains. “The Government and the [Auckland] Council are investing billions in CRL and have a shared vision for stations that become hubs for public transport, mixed-use development and new housing.”
It’s not just single-storey houses that could give way to medium-rise development. Low-rise commercial properties are also targeted. Six-storey development will be permitted within walkable distances of train stations and other transit stations such as those on the Northern and Eastern Busways.
The revised bill makes specific reference to three railway stations on the Western Line: Maungawhau (Mt Eden), Kingsland and Morningside.
“Successive governments and councils have failed to grasp this opportunity for economic growth in New Zealand’s largest city,” Bishop said. “This is how modern, growing cities all around the world operate, and now it’s Auckland’s turn.”
In my view, Bishop is largely right about all this.
The whole process is kind of technical, but bear with me. Since 2022, the council has been working through a long and extremely bureaucratic review called Plan Change 78 (PC78), to identify which parts of the city would be open to the greater density set out in the MDRS.
As Bishop says, “Progress has been slow for many reasons, including the Auckland floods. The intensification plan change process does not allow Auckland to ‘downzone’ certain areas due to natural hazard risk – only to ‘upzone’ them – and the council wrote to the Government asking them to fix this problem.”
That is, after the 2023 floods it became worrying clear that the planning rules could not prevent development on flood plains. This should now change.
The Government will allow the council to withdraw PC78, although not entirely, and not so it can revert to its old ways.
Bishop told the council earlier in the year to get its PC78 decision-making done for the central city, and that has now happened. Higher buildings will be permitted, although not everywhere (more on this soon). This aspect of PC78 is not being withdrawn.
But for the rest of the city, Bishop has instructed Mayor Brown to process a new plan change urgently. They have until October 10 to do it, and the resulting housing capacity must not be less than was going to be permitted under the PC78 and the MDRS.
This means that if the council wants to limit density in some areas, like flood plains, it will have to increase the capacity in others. And if the council wants to continue preserving the villa suburbs, it will need to find a way to do that while still allowing medium-rise along the railway lines.
And do it inside the next four months. Which, as it happens, is the exact same period in which we will be electing a new council. The last day for voting is October 12.
In several parts of the city, this is going to be a very hot election topic.
Not least among them, an enormous swathe of suburbia that runs from Kingsland and Sandringham, down through Balmoral and Mt Roskill to Onehunga. This was exempted from planning rules under PC78, pending a decision on the exact route through those suburbs of the Labour Government’s ill-fated Auckland Light Rail line to the airport.
That exemption will not survive and greater density is likely for these suburbs sooner rather than later.
Bishop’s intent seems clear: he wants the council to pull finger. “The government is also considering whether further amendments to the bill to fully maximise development opportunities around other CRL stations are necessary,” he said on Wednesday, “and I will have more to say in due course.”
Mayor Brown has instructed Auckland Transport to come up with “innovative, value for money” ways to create cycleways.
Got one!
In London, a company has invented Tulip Wands: Tulip bulbs made from recycled plastic that sit atop flexible sticks to warn drivers not to stray into the cycle lane.
Cheap and surely guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.
But why should London have all the fun? If we did that here, tulips might be a bit odd, and we don’t have flowers of our own that could function in a similar way. Kowhai don’t really stick up in the same way. Flax caddies would be good, although possibly too complicated.
So what about birds? Kiwi, kōtare, kea, kākā, imagine riding along and coming across a kākāpo! Even the ones that don’t start with k would work. We could call them Bird Bollards. Or Kiwi Krash Wardens. Or Magic Manu.
Hey, Auckland Transport, or Mr Mayor, or absolutely any entrepreneur with an eye for opportunity: you can have this idea for free.
Why did Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown and his deputy, Desley Simpson, bury the hatchet ahead of the council election in October?
They don’t get on – even in their joint announcement they said things that annoyed each other. They were going to battle each other for the mayoralty.
Simpson explained that when it came down to it, there weren’t any big policy differences between the two, which is probably true.
But what Brown said pointed to a much stronger purpose for the pair. They’re setting up a ticket.
Under the name Fix Auckland, which was Brown’s slogan in 2022, they are inviting candidates for council to apply to join them.
This isn’t just to give them a reliable voting bloc, because Brown pretty much has that already. Councillors who might join them, like Greg Sayers in Rodney, Andy Baker in Franklin and Daniel Newman in Manurewa-Papakura, already vote with Brown most of the time.
The real value of the ticket is that it will allow Brown to campaign against some of the councillors he believes play obstructive and damaging roles.
Top of his list are the two he calls “the Albanians”: Wayne Walker and John Watson, who represent the Albany ward. Both cheered Brown’s election in 2022 but they’ve fallen out badly with him since. The mayor makes no secret of his frustration at their strident opposition to most things he wants to do.
That frustration extends to others, most notably Mike Lee from Waitematā and Gulf, who was also a cheerleader for Brown until he wasn’t, and Lotu Fuli from Manukau.
Lee’s seat is highly marginal, but Walker, Watson and Fuli have big majorities and in ordinary circumstances would be unlikely to lose. But if Brown can find credible Fix Auckland candidates to stand against them, it could make quite a difference.
He will also want to find credible candidates to replace other councillors who have often opposed him and are now retiring: that includes Angela Dalton in Manurewa-Papakura, Alf Filipaina in Manukau and Kerrin Leoni in Whau (who is standing for the mayoralty but not the ward). There may be more still to announce.
However, talk of political tickets on council should not be overstated. The track record is less than reassuring.
For example, there are currently two councillors who were elected in 2022 on the National Party-aligned Communities and Residents (C&R) ticket: Christine Fletcher and Simpson herself.
But they have never worked as a team and often don’t vote the same way. Simpson left C&R last year in circumstances that remain unexplained.
The National Party has other members on council too, including the former cabinet minister Maurice Williamson, but none of them stood as a party candidate and they are not organised as a team.
On the Labour side of politics it’s much the same. Six councillors belong to the party and five of them (Josephine Bartley, Filipaina, Fuli, Shane Henderson and Leoni) even stood under the Labour name. But the sixth, Richard Hills, didn’t.
They don’t always vote together and they were bitterly split by Brown’s proposal to sell the council’s airport shares. Similar splits in party allegiances have happened in the Wellington City Council.
In short, having a ticket will enhance Brown’s chances of getting his chosen candidates elected to council while removing some he doesn’t want. But if he wants his ticket to vote consistently as a team, he’ll need someone to help him build caucus discipline.
And that is something the more people-oriented Desley Simpson is likely to be better at than him. This is the strength of their union. What we don’t yet know is what she’ll get out of it.
The existence of a Fix Auckland ticket may be especially influential in the Waitematā and Gulf ward, which covers the inner city plus Waiheke and Aotea/Great Barrier islands.
Incumbent Mike Lee, an independent, will be opposed by Patrick Reynolds, a transport expert and deputy chair of the City Centre Advisory Panel. He’s the candidate for City Vision, an umbrella group for Labour, the Greens and progressive independents.
At least two members of the local board are also expected to join the race: Sarah Trotman, of C&R, and Genevieve Sage, who was elected on the C&R ticket in 2022 but forced out when she accepted City Vision support to become chair of the board.
Sage and Trotman may both be keen on a Fix Auckland endorsement.
Meanwhile, the election for the Waitematā local board itself has attracted a couple of extremely notable candidates.
One is Anne Batley Burton, who was once one of TV’s Real Housewives of Auckland. She calls herself the Champagne Lady, because she imports champagne and is often photographed holding a glass of the stuff. She also calls herself the Pussy Cat Lady, because her “main passion in life is looking after stray and abandoned cats”. She’s on the C&R ticket.
The other is Connor Sharp, on the City Vision ticket. Sharp has become one of the leading advocates of “density done well” in a functional, thriving and less car-dependent city. He writes for the Greater Auckland website, most recently about ways for the Karangahape Rd precinct to fulfil its potential once the City Rail Link opens.
Sharp likes to quote the Danish urban planner Jan Gehl: “A good city is like a good party – people stay longer than really necessary because they are enjoying themselves. If you see a city with many children and many old people using the city’s public spaces, it’s a sign that it’s a good quality place for people.”
Sharp says the city centre waterfront is perhaps the best example.
“People flock to Te Komititanga square every day, drawn there not only by the central train station, ferries, express buses, and bike paths, but also attracted by the new shops, seating and trees to sit under, and places to gather, pause, and enjoy the show.
“We do this because it is somewhere we feel safe and comfortable to relax and have fun. Yet only a decade ago Te Komititanga was a road, filled with buses. Now, it is a place to go to, rather than go through. It’s emblematic of a general buzz – more people shopping and visiting businesses, boosting the economy while securing jobs and creating opportunities to connect.”
Batley Burton, for her part, says she wants to “take back Auckland’s Viaduct” for Super City socialites.
That’s two very different Aucklands represented right there.
As the July 1 deadline for implementing the Government’s badly written new Speed Rule draws close, more silliness unfolds.
One example: At Hatfields Beach, on the Hibiscus Coast Highway north of Ōrewa, motorists can now drive at 70km through the area populated by beachgoers and other pedestrians but must then shift down to 60km through open farmland before being allowed to speed up to 80km.
Auckland Transport chair Richard Leggat wrote to the Minister of Transport, Chris Bishop, seeking clarification, but an OIA request I made on the correspondence shows the response he received was not heartening.
Bishop has confirmed that whatever the anomalies and oddities, the higher speed limits mandated by the new rule will be in place by July 1. Most are already in place.
When AT met with the council in early June, speed limits were on the agenda. So was temporary traffic management, better known as the curse of the road cones.
Councillor Julie Fairey asked AT’s chief executive Dean Kimpton about the relationship between the two.
Everyone wants fewer cones, she pointed out, but once all the higher speed limits are in, won’t that mean any new temporary traffic management on those roads will have to be more intense, because the risks are greater?
“Will higher speeds mean more road cones?” she asked.
“It could do,” replied Kimpton, “it could do.”
Unintended consequences, eh. Kimpton also said that now lower speed limits had been removed as a tool to improve road safety, “we’re looking at a system-wide approach”.
This led to a peculiar observation. “One outcome could be that we put in more safety infrastructure,” he said, “and that makes the roads safer.”
He kept a straight face while he said it. In reality, the “safety infrastructure” he’s talking about is more pedestrian crossings and raised crossings on urban roads, more median barriers and wide shoulders on rural roads, and more expensive intersection redesigns.
All of which will cost a lot more and not be popular with the drivers the higher speed limits are designed to appease.
Unintended consequences, again? It would be if it happened. But it won’t, because there’s no budget to replace cheap and effective lower speed zones with expensive road redesigns.
In the same meeting, councillor Richard Hills had a question for the AT executives.
“We know raising speeds will increase deaths and serious injuries. It’s not a guesstimate, it’s data. So who is responsible under the Health and Safety Act for those extra deaths and injuries? Is it just the minister? Is it you? Is it us?”
AT’s general counsel Gavin Scott replied, “We’re comfortable that we have fulfilled our duties in regard to safety.”
Really? AT is designated under statute as the road-controlling authority (RCA) for non-highway roads in Auckland. Precisely because road use is inherently dangerous, RCAs are legally responsible to maintain roads, and the rules for their use, to a standard the public can rely on with a reasonable expectation of safety.
But Scott then said, “People in the public realm are beyond our obligations.” What?
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