This is a photo of an elected official aiming his fingers at another elected official and pretending to shoot him in the back of the head. In a public meeting. Some of the people around him seem to find it funny.
The trigger guy is Ōrākei Local Board member Troy Churton and the meeting was in Mt Eden on Thursday night. The topic: housing.
Specifically, Auckland Council’s new draft plan to create the capacity for two million homes in the city by the late 2050s. This plan has been produced in response to a Government directive.
Churton believes the Government, represented here by local MP and Cabinet minister Paul Goldsmith, has put “a gun to the head” of Aucklanders. Challenged about this language during the meeting, he repeated the accusation several times.
I guess you could say he’s shooting back. Is it helpful?
Making good decisions when it comes to housing is never easy. Almost everyone who spoke during a packed Mt Eden meeting this week, from the platform and the floor, started with the same mantra.
“I’m in favour of more housing density,” they said. “I know we have a housing crisis. I know we need to build more homes. Doing it close to town centres and around transport hubs is the right way to go. I support all that. I’m not a Nimby. But I just don’t want them to do it here, in my suburb, on my street.”
Nimby: not in my back yard.
They had deeply felt reasons for their concerns. The problem with the council’s new draft planning rules, most of them said, is not that the goals are wrong. It’s that they’re doing it wrong. Especially in Mt Eden.
Many said the suburb lacks the necessary infrastructure.
Some said property values will fall, which isn’t fair on them. Others said property values will rise, which goes against what Housing and RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop says he wants. A third group insisted it wouldn’t make any difference.
The process is all wrong, said many. We haven’t been consulted. The Government shouldn’t be telling the council what to do and the council shouldn’t be telling us.
Almost everyone believed they intend to build “two million more homes”, which is plainly ridiculous.
This will ruin my street and ruin my home, was the unspoken, heartfelt fear of almost everyone.
As a general principle, governments don’t have the right to ruin people’s homes. So what’s going on?
Is this plan really being foisted on the city without regard for infrastructure, housing numbers and democratic processes? Will it be the ruination of private homes?
In some parts of Auckland, residents have legitimate gripes about a lack of infrastructure. Warkworth and the Mahurangi Peninsula have not been well served by Watercare, the Eastern Busway is still being completed and the Northwest one hasn’t started, for most people there’s no good way to get to the airport and the central city doesn’t have any schools.
But has the council been sitting on its hands? I asked Richard Hills, the councillor who chairs the Policy and Planning Committee. “Over the past nine years we have quadrupled our annual water infrastructure spending,” he said, “and more than tripled our transport spend.
“Since 2016, Watercare has connected 64,655 properties to its networks – that’s like a new city the size of Napier – without compromising service quality.”
He said the Central Interceptor, a new main sewage tunnel for the Auckland isthmus, is nearing completion. “Watercare has 120 other projects currently in construction and there will be more than 1000 projects over 10 years to support new housing and to protect the environment. They’re spending $13.8 billion on capital works in that time and half of it, $6.8b, will be to support growth.”
Hills reckons some of the people who say there isn’t enough infrastructure also object, often loudly, to the things that pay for it: rates rises, debt levels and raising revenue from other sources.
He said some of his colleagues on council “pretend not to understand how we use debt to fund capital projects for future generations”.
We can see the new infrastructure growing all around us. It’s what’s happening behind all those road cones and underneath those “expensive” cycleways where, typically, most of the cost is in renewing and expanding underground services.
On Wednesday, this paper reported critics of the new housing plan saying there would not be enough infrastructure. Right underneath that story, another one explained the Government’s $30b spend across 9200 infrastructure projects currently under way or ready to go. That money complements the council’s spending.
On Friday, a third story reported school principals worrying about a lack of new schools for all the new schoolkids. But this is a panic response. As density grows around train stations, residents will need more playgrounds and parks, shopping centres and, yes, schools.
We’re talking about a 30-year growth plan and there is time to plan and build all of them. Provided the revenue keeps flowing to do it.
But what about Mt Eden: is it under-served?
The suburb is at the hub of the City Rail Link, already built, and there are excellent bus links on Mt Eden Rd, Dominion Rd and New North Rd. Watercare’s capacity maps, which are publicly available, show good water supply and wastewater services. With the vast open area around the Maungawhau station there is public land available not only for development but for green open space.
Hills said Watercare has the capacity for an additional 119,000 homes on the metropolitan network. He added that it is far harder and far more expensive to provide new services on greenfield land.
During the Thursday night meeting, Goldsmith suggested apartment buildings on the city’s outskirts, in places like Drury, might be better than close to town. The opposite is true.
Mt Eden and the nearby suburbs have the town centres, stations and arterial roads that make them almost a perfect fit for density. The plan, on the whole, limits that density to those areas. And council agencies have ensured it has the infrastructure to support it.
First up, it’s not two million “more” homes. The new plan, like the one before it, will allow for a capacity of two million homes, in total, by the late 2050s.
More importantly, nobody is planning for the city to have two million homes. That would house six to eight million people, but the city is expected to grow in that time to something under three million.
If you stop to think about it, the idea of planning for eight million people is so absurd, the reasonable response is not to get outraged. It’s to suspect this is probably not what they’re doing.
And you’d be right. This is a plan to allow property owners the right to develop in various targeted areas. It enables tall apartment blocks in the places most people say they should go, in order to preserve lower limits in quieter suburban areas, not close to town centres or transit.
It doesn’t say those tower blocks must happen, but that they can. If the council was to say, “Okay, we’re going to need 300,000 more homes so we’ll zone enough properties to allow exactly that”, property owners would then be forced to build as instructed and they would object very strongly.
With good reason: neither the Government nor the council has that kind of power over private property.
Yes! The Government should not be directing the council in this. But the council brought it on themselves, having spent the past four years failing to adopt a viable plan for the growth it knows is coming.
The Government should not have insisted the council draft a new plan in the middle of its elections and it should have given officials more time to do the drafting. As it is, they’re still running models to see what it will mean in all parts of the city.
But the democratic process has not been abandoned: we’re debating this fiercely right now. That won’t stop. And after September 24, if the council formally decides it wants to abandon the existing plan and push on with the new draft, the whole process will open up.
A new council will be elected on October 11 and will call for public feedback. There is a statutory process for this and it will be followed.
At the heart of it, the concerns of Mt Eden residents, like others in the “villa suburbs”, are about whether the villas will remain.
Most of them will. The council’s director of planning Megan Tyler says 15,357 properties will retain their “special character status”. That means 5763 properties, or 27%, will not.
The maps show where the status remains and where it goes, for the Albert-Eden local board area. Not all the homes to lose this status actually have special character, and not all of them will be sold for development.
It’s a compromise and it’s not the first time Mt Eden has faced it.
The suburb is lovely now: leafy streets, lush gardens, many beautiful old homes, and yet it has something else. Stroll around those streets and you’re quickly struck by how many mid-rise apartment blocks and rows of flats there are.
There was a fuss in the 1970s when all that happened too, but development obviously did not destroy the suburb.
Labour MP Helen White, speaking at the Thursday meeting, reminded the crowd the city has a homelessness crisis that “directly correlates” with the wider housing crisis.
“These are gnarly decisions,” she said, and not just because of the homeless. She knew many young people upset that they can’t afford to live where they grew up. The solution, she said, is to “go up, but go up well”.
“We need to make sure the Government is thinking about that. About how to do it well.”
And there was Reuben, a student at the back, who said he flats in a mouldy old villa in a special character area and he could not see the value in it.
“I’m sorry to the bald guy at the front,” he said, referring to Churton. “But I know what it feels like having a gun pointed at my head. You’re part of a generation that refuses to bow to the reality of this.”
“Inter-generational bulls***!” Churton shouted at him.
“Yeah, thank you, mate,” said Reuben. “It speaks a lot to your character. If you’re going to talk like that, how about you go ...”
And then he was very rude. Gnarly decisions, indeed.