Why is central Auckland built up to the east, but not the west? Because this view of Maungawhau/Mt Eden is protected. Photo / Jason Dorday
Auckland is one of the few cities in the world that bans tall buildings if they threaten to block public views – in our case, of some much-loved volcanic cones. But this could soon change, with a senior Government minister arguing the rules choke economic growth. Simon Wilson reports.
If you stand in the middle of the intersection at the top of Great North Rd and look southeast down Newton Rd, you will have a splendidly uninterrupted view of Maungawhau, Mt Eden, the tallest volcano in mainland Auckland. This view is not an accident of geography or urban development. It’s protected by law.
Of course, if you do stand in the middle of that intersection to admire the view, you will probably get run over.
It’s much the same with the Auckland Harbour Bridge. There’s a protected view of Maungawhau on the northern approach, in a place where, until 1984, vehicles used to queue for the toll booth. You’d almost certainly cause a nasty crash if you stopped there now.
These protected views are commonly called “viewshafts”. They, and dozens more like them, are now up for review.
The Minister Responsible for RMA Reform, Chris Bishop, thinks viewshafts “eviscerate hundreds of millions of dollars of economic value”, as he put it in a speech in mid-June. In other speeches in recent months, Bishop has quoted a 2018 study which suggested the toll-booth viewshaft has cost the central city in excess of $1.4 billion.
So he’s decided to do something about it.
Others say, hang on.
“Most cities,” North Shore ward councillor Chris Darby says, “have few really unique features. But we do. We have the volcanoes. Being able to appreciate them as you move around the city is one of the special things about living here.”
Darby’s view is probably shared by most of his colleagues. Over the Super City’s 15-year history, Auckland Council has shown no interest in making any significant changes to the viewshafts.
Bishop points out that in 2016, the council was told quite bluntly by an Independent Hearings Panel (IHP) that it should rethink its approach in order to achieve greater economic efficiency and reduced opportunity costs.
That panel had reviewed the viewshaft proposals in the council’s draft Auckland Unitary Plan, the big new document that was about to become the city’s blueprint for what can be built where.
For the most part, it didn’t want them eliminated. But it did point out that the council had done “no sensitivity analysis”. That is, despite having the necessary technology, it had not looked at whether even “slight changes” might “significantly reduce [the viewshafts’] impact on development opportunities while retaining views to the maunga [peak]”.
Nor did it have a method for deciding if any loss in floor area of new buildings was “an appropriate trade-off for the values of any particular viewshaft”.
“In the almost-decade since,” Bishop said in a speech in February, “this work has not been progressed.”
The Government has now told the council it must produce a new zoning plan which allows for greater density, and it must be done, with public consultation, by October 10. That’s two days before postal voting closes in this year’s council elections.
The council is expected to consider its position at a meeting on July 31 – and a fight is brewing.
There are nearly 80 viewshafts in Auckland. They’re mapped like slices of pie: wedges that emanate from a single point where a person can stand, like the top of Newton Rd, or from a stretch of road you can drive along, like the northern approach to the bridge.
Building heights are strictly limited inside the boundaries of each wedge, so the view of the natural landscape is preserved, and this creates an overlay on the planning zones. As a rule, buildings inside a viewshaft require a resource consent and if they are to be higher than 9m they may be regarded as “non-complying”. In this context, it is extremely difficult for such buildings to get a resource consent.
Most viewshafts have been in place since 1977, after the Pines apartment block was built on the side of Maungawhau (Mt Eden) in 1969, causing a public outcry and changes to planning rules.
Not that views of Maungawhau have been completely preserved since then: the Department of Corrections was allowed to build a bigger Mt Eden Prison, interrupting the viewshaft from the motorway that runs past it.
Much of the attention still focuses on the views of that maunga, which isn’t surprising: the nearby central city is where most high-rise development occurs. In fact, Maungawhau is protected by 20 viewshafts, including one from Devonport and one from the Z petrol station on Kepa Rd in Ōrākei.
But views of Te Pane o Mataoho (Māngere Mountain), Puketāpapa (Mt Roskill) and the other cones are protected too.
And it’s not just the cones: views of the Waitākere Ranges and some other ridgelines are also protected, along with views of the Auckland War Memorial Museum.
The rules have had a dramatic effect on the city centre. The Sky Tower and the council building on Albert St are just outside the eastern edge of the toll-booth viewshaft, which is known as E10.
There’s another viewshaft protecting the view of Maungawhau from the bridge itself, called E16. It roughly parallels E10.
If you look at the city centre from the north, across the harbour, you can see the effect plainly: east of the Sky Tower, the city is built up.
But west of the tower, the level suddenly drops. The Viaduct, Wynyard Quarter, around Victoria Park and up to the new International Convention Centre on Hobson St are all part of the central city. But there are no tall buildings.
Constructing high-rise buildings on all this land is prevented by E10 and E16.
Bishop thinks the toll-booth viewshaft is especially absurd. Drivers on a motorway are supposed to keep their eyes on the road.
But councillor Richard Hills, the chair of the council’s policy and planning committee, says: “50% of morning commuters going over the bridge are in a bus, enjoying the view.” Even some of the cars have passengers.
The minister rests his argument against viewshafts on the economic advantages that come with housing and workplace density, especially near major transit stations and along transit corridors.
“In a well-functioning city,” Bishop told his Committee for Auckland audience, “a floor filled with smart people working next to each other, in a building filled with floors of smart people working next to each other, unsurprisingly, enables greater economic opportunities for productive growth. Proximity encourages collaboration and innovation.”
That’s on top of the more obvious benefits of having lots of people living and working near train stations and rapid bus stations. More people equals better transit services, because there are more passengers to pay for them. And that takes traffic off the roads.
Having lots of people living closer to town also makes their commute shorter, which also takes traffic off the roads.
This has become critical in Bishop’s thinking about the City Rail Link (CRL), which will open next year, doubling the capacity of Auckland’s rail network.
“The City Rail Link is a game-changing investment in the future of Auckland,” he said on June 25. “It will unlock significant economic opportunity, but only if we have a planning system to allow businesses and residents to take advantage of it.”
Because of this, Bishop used that February speech to call for zoning in Auckland to abandon the six-storey limit around major transit stops, which defines the height of most apartment blocks. That will impact E10, E16, the Newton Rd view (E20) and several other viewshafts.
“We are going to need to go much, much higher than that around the CRL stations if we truly want to feel the benefits of transit-oriented development,” he said. “My aspiration is that in 10 to 20 years’ time, we have 10- to 20-storey apartment blocks dotting the rail line as far west as Swanson and Rānui.”
You can see the prototype now, in the form of the 10-storey Westlight Apartments in Glen Eden.
Why is there no Westlight in Kingsland, which has a train station and several bus routes? Partly, it’s because of the protected views of nearby Maungawhau. It’s also partly because of a “special character” overlay, put there by the council, which preserves older housing areas.
Bishop threw down the gauntlet: “How about if our aim is to make the ‘special character’ of suburbs be that they are thriving, liveable, affordable communities with access to regular and reliable public transport?”
In May, the council adopted new zoning rules for the central city. They allow for more density, but they leave large parts restricted to six-storey heights. The minister’s gauntlet was left lying on the ground.
He responded quickly. “The Auckland CBD plan could go a lot further, in my view. It is a real missed opportunity and in due course, the council is going to have to have another look at it, particularly around the viewshafts.”
On June 25, Bishop and the Minister for Auckland, Simeon Brown, pulled out their swords. They jointly announced they will legislate to require upzoning for buildings of “at least 15 storeys” in the “walkable catchments” around the Maungawhau, Kingsland and Morningside stations and at least 10 storeys near Mt Albert and Baldwin Avenue stations.
Fifteen-storey buildings are about 50m tall. Walkable catchments extend in a radius of about 800m, which is taken as the distance of a 10-minute walk.
The walkable catchment for the Maungawhau station includes the New North Rd ridge, whose current medium-rise buildings are capped to maintain the viewshaft from Newton Rd, which is known as E20.
Bishop’s 15-storey ambition would almost certainly spell an end to E20 and could well mean the same for E10, E16 and other Maungawhau viewshafts.
The minister says he doesn’t want to eliminate viewshafts. But what does he want? The signals are mixed.
“Even just minor tweaks to existing viewshafts could materially lift development opportunities,” Bishop said in February. “The 2018 study showed that rotating the E10 viewshaft just 4.5 degrees to the left maintains the view of Mt Eden for a similar amount of time, whilst saving the city 43% of the lost development opportunity cost.”
By “to the left” he means to the west. Views of Maungawhau would be preserved not from the northern approach to the bridge, almost back to Onewa Rd, but from the stretch of highway closer to the bridge, when the maunga is more in front of you.
The 4.5 degree adjustment would free up significant parcels of land for high rises. These include some of the Wynyard Quarter and the Viaduct, the Fanshawe/Victoria streets block at the bottom of Nelson St, the TVNZ and Convention Centre block on Hobson St, and the block bordered by Queen St, Karangahape Rd and Symonds St.
It also includes the northern half of Wynyard Point, if the council was ever to decide a sentinel waterfront tower should be built there.
But that’s all within what Bishop calls “minor tweaks”. His talk of “economic evisceration”, the “immense” economic and social rewards on offer and new 15-storey and 10-storey buildings near stations all suggest he has more sweeping changes in mind.
In August last year, he told the Herald the biggest barrier to building on the Maungawhau station site was viewshafts.
And yet, when the Herald asked him directly what he wants – how his hopes for all those tall buildings relate to viewshafts – he replied with a carefully worded written response.
“The bill will provide for a qualifying matters framework which will enable Auckland Council to modify these heights [15 storeys and 10 storeys] to the extent necessary to accommodate a qualifying matter (such as the protection of viewshafts) if this level of development is inappropriate.
“However, any lower heights would need to be justified in accordance with the framework. I intend to use my Direction on the new plan change to reinforce the legislative requirement that heights and densities may only be reduced to the extent necessary to accommodate one or more qualifying matters.”
This seems to mean there will be more high rises, but viewshafts could become qualifying matters that limit their extent. To some degree.
The debate has ever been thus. Density is easy: almost everyone says it’s a good thing, provided it’s done in the right places and in the right way. But defining the wrong places and ways, known in the legal language of town planning as “qualifying matters”, is a process that defeats even the most optimistic attempts at consensus.
Sally Hughes of the Character Coalition, an umbrella group dedicated to preserving the character of the villa suburbs, says changes to viewshafts, special character or other zoning laws are not required because there are “plenty of under-utilised sites” near the Kingsland and Maungawhau stations “which are ready for intensification now”.
Who doesn’t think, when it’s their own street, their own view, their own sun at stake: don’t do it here, do it somewhere over there?
The source of Bishop’s thinking on viewshafts is a 2018 paper called City with a Billion Dollar View, written by Geoff Cooper, a former economist with PwC and Auckland Council. It was Cooper who came up with the toll-booth anomaly, the benefits of tweaking E10 by 4.5 degrees and that $1.4b figure for lost economic opportunity.
Cooper is now the chief executive of the crown agency Te Waihana: the Infrastructure Commission and, at least informally, has the ear of the minister.
As for Cooper’s old employer, Auckland Council, it does not subscribe to his analysis of the economic damage done by viewshafts.
The Herald talked to the council’s manager of central area planning, John Duguid, about all this in May. Duguid said he doesn’t see the need for higher buildings in the E10 viewshaft.
“East of E10,” he said, referring to the parts of the central city already built up, “there’s still a lot of development potential.”
Duguid also said the toll-booth story is a myth: E10 has never been just for drivers queueing at the booths.
He thinks if it does need to be changed, “it could be narrowed a bit”.
If you squint, that sounds a bit like the minister’s “tweaks”. Even Cooper said something similar in 2018: he called for changes that would “provide a middle path for city planners that reduce the cost, while preserving views”.
But Duguid and the council seem largely intent on preserving the status quo and the minister wants change. The council, Bishop says, has been “dragging its feet”.
Let’s back up a little. First, to note that the 14 prominent volcanic maunga of Tāmaki Makaurau are governed by the Tūpuna Maunga Authority, which comprises equal membership from Ngā Mana Whenua o Tāmaki Makaurau and Auckland Council.
The Government will need a strong relationship with the authority, Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and the other relevant iwi, if it wants to change the way we value, see and use the maunga of Tāmaki Makaurau.
Second, to note the wider planning context. When the Auckland Unitary Plan (AUP) was adopted in 2016, it preserved the viewshafts while also allowing for the “character areas” Bishop is annoyed about.
This provision has been used to protect the villas of the city fringe: the ring of suburbs that runs from Devonport across the harbour to St Mary’s Bay, Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, Mt Eden and Parnell.
In 2020, the Labour-led Government’s National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD) required councils in the larger centres to change their district plans (in Auckland’s case, the Unitary Plan), in order to provide for more substantial housing growth than most had been willing to accept.
This was followed by new Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS) in 2021 and a revision to the NPS-UD in 2022. All were aimed at achieving greater density.
In Auckland, the council responded by drawing up Plan Change 78 (PC78) and putting it on a slow track to approval. Most councils have now made their plan changes, but Auckland Council has completed PC78 only in respect of the central city, despite closing public submissions nearly three years ago.
PC78 (Central City Zone) contains higher limits for development in some areas, but there is no rethink of the viewshafts or the six-storey limit more widely. This was largely supported in submissions from the public.
Bishop is clearly frustrated. The minister speaks positively of the NPS-UD and says he will build on it, not abandon it. His Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Bill, which will speed up urban density, is back from select committee hearings and due to become law next month.
In relation to the bill, Duguid says: “Our working assumption is that applying ‘qualifying matters’, including maunga viewshafts, will still be an option, albeit with more onerous requirements to justify them.”
On the other hand, Bishop wants those 15-storey buildings near Maungawhau, Kingsland and Morningside stations.
And he has told the council: “The Government is also considering whether further amendments to the bill to fully maximise development opportunities around other CRL stations are necessary, and I will have more to say in due course.”
That is, station precincts on the Western Line won’t be the only ones to get new height allowances. Ōrākei, Meadowbank and Glen Innes on the Eastern Line and Newmarket, Remuera, Greenlane and Ellerslie on the Southern Line are all no further away from the city centre than the Western Line’s Mt Albert.
Duguid and his staff have been busy preparing options for a council response to Bishop’s pronouncements, for debate by the governing body of council on July 31.
Defenders of the viewshafts have taken a persuasive lead role for many decades in the planning and consultation processes of Auckland Council and its predecessors.
Prominent among them have been the Auckland Volcanic Cones Society and the Friends of Maungawhau.
Roy Turner of the Volcanic Cones Society was the planner charged by the Auckland Regional Council with writing the original 1976 report on viewshafts.
In March, he told the Herald that he likes “most of what Chris Bishop is advocating, but with the cones issue, some of his justification is misguided”.
Turner suggests we think about it this way. “There is a massive area of open space in central Auckland called the Auckland Domain. An economist might calculate how many billions of dollars have been lost by not developing here. The public would respond by saying this is truly an Auckland icon: hands off, no way can we develop here.
“Quite right, but can’t we have our cake and eat it too? Let’s just take 10%. A few years down the track, on balance, let’s take another 10%, for the same reason, and so on.”
Others see it differently. At Greater Auckland, Scott Caldwell has attempted to distinguish between “the good, the bad, the ugly” and the “bit ridiculous”. Some viewshafts are blocked by trees, others emanate from places almost no one ever goes. Better to keep the trees and the views that really are valued?
Caldwell’s not against all viewshafts. Maungawhau as seen from Mt Eden Village, he says, looms above the street magnificently. He’d definitely keep that one.
And he has a proposal. He points out that Instagram is full of maunga photos, but they’re not of the maunga. Instead, they’re nearly all taken by people standing on the mountain and looking at the view from it.
These are the views we really value, he says, so they’re the ones we should protect.
If the Government changes the viewshaft rules in favour of economic growth, affordable housing, optimal use of transit or some other purpose, how big will the benefits be?
We don’t know the answer to that, but last month Bishop told the Herald he has instructed officials to find out. They’re looking at “the impact of Auckland’s viewshafts on development capacity and economic activity across Auckland”.
He added: “I acknowledge there are also benefits, including to mana whenua, which are difficult to quantify.”
Bishop wants the work done this year, although it will probably not meet the October 10 deadline for Auckland’s new plan change. But, he said, “it will help to provide a good evidence base for future plan development as part of the new resource management system”.
That all looks like a message for the council: the work you could have done, and should have done, according to the Independent Hearings Panel in 2016, is now being done by the Government.
If the council won’t address the challenges and opportunities for growth and housing in Auckland, the Government will.
If you don’t build it, we will come. And we will do it for you.
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.