Viv Beck complains about a lack of car parks, but those who should know do not agree. Photo / Alex Burton
OPINION
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown gave a talk in Remuera last Friday and the first question from the crowd was about the Downtown carpark. Why, they wanted to know, are we losing our beloved parking building?
The council-owned building on Customs St West is being sold to Precinct Properties, the developer behind Commercial Bay, the new shopping centre and high-rise at the bottom of Queen St.
Precinct intends to repeat the exercise on the Downtown site and the council has agreed it will not need to build a big new parking building.
Meanwhile, a wealthy property owner, a rival to Precinct, has begun court action to try to stop the development. This could cost the council hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The mayor was blunt. “That car park is usually only half full,” he said. “And let me tell you, Precinct are very successful property developers. They know what their customers want and if they thought there was demand for a large carpark they would build it.”
I’ve asked Precinct about this myself. When Commercial Bay opened, the company offered free valet parking. That service has now stopped.
“In addition to the decrease in demand for the valet service,” a spokesperson told me, “we are seeing a decrease in demand for car parking from our office occupiers. This is despite foot traffic within Commercial Bay remaining steady, and office workers returning to rates consistent with pre-Covid levels.”
What about the retailers? Do they want parking for their customers?
“Commercial Bay retailers, like us, will of course want to ensure there are enough car parks available for their customers. We are confident there is currently, and there will be in the future, more than enough parking for customers coming to the city centre.”
They would know. It’s their money on the line. The company says it will provide “an additional 200 public short-stay car parks” in the area.
This hasn’t stopped Viv Beck, chief executive of the business group Heart of the City (HOTC), from complaining bitterly in the Herald.
“It will be very concerning if the sale of this carpark goes ahead without an acceptable alternative,” she wrote.
You could call it parking panic, but the facts are these. The Downtown building has 1944 parking spaces, of which 1148 are for short-stay parking. Peak use is around 2pm.
The most recent Auckland Transport data, for weekdays in October, shows the building was never more than 61 per cent full that month. By 4pm it ranged from 25 to 43 per cent. October is typical and Brown’s “half full” claim is right.
Council agency Eke Panuku says there are currently 4400 public car parks within 500 metres of the Downtown site. That’s a five-minute walk, tops. Within 750m, there are 12,300.
The area is also the best-served public transport hub in the city, with all the train lines and ferry routes and many bus services converging there.
People are fond of the Downtown park because it’s relatively cheap. But that’s a red herring because it won’t stay that way.
Even if the council kept the building, the demands for extra revenue, less congestion and lower emissions, along with maintenance costs, would soon see parking charges rise.
This did not prevent a barrage of complaints at a council meeting last month, from some of the councillors and from property developer Andrew Krukziener. He made a very angry submission and then continued to interject from the public gallery.
Krukziener is close to Beck. He told the Herald last year that he contributed “a six-figure pledge” to her disastrous mayoral election campaign and arranged for “other parties who have made substantial pledges”.
In Remuera on Friday, Brown revealed his own view of HOTC. It is, he said, “the worst-performing business association in the city”.
He was thinking about crime, which Beck also frequently complains about, and he compared HOTC to the Ōtāhuhu Business Association, of which he’s a member.
He said Ōtāhuhu has a budget of $600,000 and spends a third of that on security. “As a result, crime has dropped.”
Last financial year, in contrast, HOTC spent only 13 per cent of its budget on security. “And,” said Brown, “they had the cheek to say ratepayers should pay for new cameras.”
The 13 per cent HOTC spent on security equates to $620,000 - still significantly more than Otāhuhu Business Association. But it is less proportionally, given HOTC has a much larger annual budget.
Beck disputes that HOTC ever requested Auckland Council to fund more security cameras. However, the Herald understands it was a suggestion at least informally proposed by HOTC during a confidential council workshop.
Everyone agrees street crime is an issue, but the spending gap is instructive.
Brown also compared Commercial Bay, which is doing well, with Queen St, where “lots of shops are closed”. He’s overstating that: There are definitely fewer than a year ago.
Still, the difference was easy to see on Saturday. In the atrium of Commercial Bay, a choir sang to raise money for the City Mission and a swirling crowd filled Te Komititanga square, between the shops and the railway station. Behind the station, the Saturday market, shops, restaurants and public spaces were bursting with people.
There were also lots of people along Queen St. But not a single retailer was taking advantage of the wide pavements to entertain shoppers or promote their wares. Quite a few did not even seem to have Christmas decorations up.
Why isn’t Heart of the City doing more to help those members make the most of their improved streetscapes?
What’s really going on here? Hint: It’s not about car parks.
HOTC disputes they do not adequately invest in the streetscape of the city. Beck cites a spend of $100,000 on the Christmas in Te Komititanga project and $240,000 for Christmas on Queen Street initiatives - including performances throughout December. She says a similar level of investment was made in 2022 and in prior years, such as the light show on the former Post Office building in 2021.
Brown told the Remuera crowd that “40 per cent of the offices in and around Queen St are empty”. He didn’t say it, but the heart of the city is shifting.
Instead of the old spine down the Queen St valley, the city is growing a new one: From Britomart and the new hotels near Fort St, along the made-over Quay St and past Commercial Bay and the busy little park overhanging the water, then into the Viaduct and across Te Wero bridge to the Wynyard Quarter.
The city is realigning itself along the waterfront.
Precinct’s massive new twin-tower-with-shops complex will replace the grubby backwater around the Downtown building and link this whole linear development together. And property owners like Andrew Krukziener, along with their tenants, are being left behind.
But it doesn’t have to be either/or. It’s certainly not meant to be. The City Centre Masterplan doesn’t abandon old Queen St, but represents a serious effort to revitalise the entire city centre.
The plan argues that for city centres to thrive they must be pedestrian-friendly and filled with attractive offerings: Shops, events and entertainment.
Precinct and the Britomart developer, Cooper and Co, have embraced this idea. So have the shoppers and office tenants who have flocked to them. It works and they are the proof of it.
But up Queen St and in the nearby blocks, many owners are not renovating their offices and renewing their street frontages, or not doing it well enough and fast enough. There are so many great shops in the central city, but the landlords are not all helping businesses make the most of their locations.
Most of all, despite some progress, they’re not doing whatever it takes to keep their shops and offices occupied. Even though that is the most essential requirement for a healthy shopping street.
Renewal is a constant in retailing, but Beck, Krukziener and co are stuck, obsessed with car parks while customers migrate to a precinct that deliberately deprioritises both driving and parking.
Oddly, this means HOTC has in effect sided with one group of its members against another. Precinct is said to be the biggest contributor to HOTC coffers.
On Friday, Krukziener lodged a judicial review over the council’s Downtown decision. It’s the second time he’s done this in three years. Last time, also over parking, HOTC supported the action. It went nowhere.
But it cost the council - that’s ratepayers - a non-recoverable $142,432 in payments, plus perhaps about the same amount internally.
There are better things the council could have done with that money. There are also many ways for people with enough spare cash for lawsuits to help this city. They could support the City Mission or the art gallery or some sporting event. Or get all the landlords and tenants of the older CBD to wake up and smell the damn coffee.
Beck says “Heart of the City is very considered in how we arrive at our advocacy positions as an organisation, and we weigh up a number of different variables and impacts in doing so. Our position on this issue is a long-held one, as can be seen as part of a council engagement process in 2021 and included in publicly available records, specifically in June 2021 - as reported in a paper to Auckland Council’s Planning Committee “it requested the inclusion of short stay car parking on the site to ensure accessibility for all Aucklanders, at least until there is universal public transport access.”
HOTC does do many good things, including Restaurant Month, Art in the City and a range of Christmas events. But although Beck is paid to be the central city’s cheerleader-in-chief, she complains so much she undermines all that. It’s almost like she’s trying to drive people away.
Some of her members, at least, cannot be happy about this.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
This column was edited on December 22 to include comment from Viv Beck relating to HOTC’s advocacy positions.
Police closed Lewis St at 10.45am for investigation.