Auckland councillors are about to decide how the city will increase its capacity to accommodate a maximum of two million homes.
Talking to Richard Martin on The Front Page podcast, Herald senior reporter Simon Wilson clarified the confusion around the idea of two million “new” homes.
“It doesn’t mean [that many] will be built, but it’s a capacity.”
Auckland Council’s website states that number is the maximum that could be built if every site, including those that have existing homes, were fully developed to the maximum density.
It does not mean two million new homes will be possible over and above the current housing stock.
The capacity for two million homes is not new. It is baked into Planning Change 78 (PC78), which was the council’s response to the medium density residential standards (MDRS) set by the last Government.
While it isn’t fully operative, PC78 was notified in 2022 and some aspects had to take immediate effect as a requirement of the MDRS legislation.
“The MDRS was what said that basically everything can go up to three storeys anywhere, and there’s a lot of opposition to that,” Wilson said.
What councillors are being asked to decide now is whether to keep the PC78 framework in place or replace it with a new version that concentrates density around transport hubs and town centres.
The new plan would also allow the council to downzone high-risk areas, something that PC78 doesn’t allow for. That became clear after the Auckland Anniversary floods and Cyclone Gabrielle highlighted the vulnerability of parts of the city to flooding and erosion.
“It was not a good idea to allow more housing in those places. In fact, the reverse had to occur,” Wilson said.
If councillors back the new proposal it will trigger public consultation in November. The process, including hearings and recommendations, is expected to run for about 18 months.
Public opinion is far from settled. “If you go to a public meeting in Mount Eden or Remuera or Parnell, as I’ve been doing, you’ll hear some very angry locals,” Wilson said.
In other parts of the city, the reaction is muted. “It’s very different depending on where you go.
“People living in leafy suburbs, in nice villas… are worried that a three or a six-storey apartment block might appear on their street or might appear right next to them.”
While the headline maps of the new plan show broad brushstrokes, more detailed overlays will decide what can be built on a given street. Flood risk and heritage protections are two of the biggest factors.
“What that means is if you think of a place like… the Kingsland railway station, there are places near those stations that are within the walkable areas which have a concentration of historic housing. So there’s a ring on the map that says, okay, in those areas, you’re not going to have the density requirements that places outside that ring will be subjected to.”
That balance between capacity and constraint is at the heart of the plan.
“If they only zoned for 600,000 new homes over the next 30 years, that would mean that every homeowner, every property owner… would be required to build to the maximum the zoning allows,” Wilson said.
“We don’t live in a country where people can be told what to do with their property in that way.”
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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