"You're free to build, but ..."

 

The National-led Coalition boasts that it will "fix housing" by bringing in rules requiring councils to zone enough land* on which land-owners are free to build sufficient housing to allow for the next thirty years of demand.**

Doesn't that sound great, you think. "Free to build," you say! 

The National-led coalition's housing honchos are either stupid, naive, or they think that we are.

As should have been obvious from Auckland council's passive-aggressive resistance to government diktats on the Medium-Density Residential Standards (MDRS), telling councils to "free up land" only works if councils are so inclined. If they are already so inclined, ministers wouldn't need to tell them. And if they aren't so inclined then, well, as Bryan Caplan points out in his new "graphic novel" Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, councils can hinder construction in dozens of other ways ... if it's so inclined. (And it is.)

For starters it could ...

Go tell Minister Bishop. (Or send him a copy of Bryan's book.)

* * * * 

* Zoning is a restriction on land telling owners that the planners know better than the owner (and would-be buyers) what should go there. How is it a restriction, you ask? If the planners' zone allows what the owner would do anyway, it's not needed. If it disallows it, it's not wanted.

** This presumes that the grey ones would even know, to any standard of meaningful proof, what demand would look like over the next thirty years. I mean, it's not like there's any thirty-year stretch in recent history they could point to and say "look, we got it right."

Getting better homes faster

 

New Zealand needs more houses, and less Resource Management Act.

Fact is, if houses are going to be anywhere near affordable again, New Zealand needs many more houses, and no RMA. 

Instead, we have RMA for several more years, and a housing/RMA minister (Chris Bishop) who's created uncertainty and fewer housing starts by allowing councils to opt out of the (formerly) bipartisan Medium-Density Residential Standards (MDRS).

What can you do now on many sites in New Zealand's major cities? Don't know, because councils haven't decided (or announced) where and how they might relax things. The uncertainty means that on many sites in major cities desperate for housing, nothing gets started at all.

What could you do under the MDRS? In simple terms (see pic above), you could build up to 3 dwellings up to 3 storeys high without having to even think about the Resource Management Act. It was far from perfect, but still the most permissive housing change from government since ... well, before I was born anyway.

But Chris Bishop has "fixed" that, hasn't he. Too permissive for Mr Bloody Bishop. Too many "externalities." Too urban.

Urbanist Malcolm McCracken has a simple solution however that even this housing minister could (should!) get behind. He calls it Graduated Density Zoning, so it's still a bloody zone, but one that allows owners who amalgamate sites to get extra density and height -- and by their amalgamation build better things and ameliorate the effects on neighbours.

By being larger and a more appropriate shape for multiple dwellings, such a site would also encourage better housing typologies to be built than the simple long 3-storey-"sausage"-arranged-along-a-single-driveway that means everyone's window looks into every neighbour's.  Things like perimeter blocks, garden apartments and the like, with better privacy, garden outlooks and less iunmpact on neighbours (so what's not to like?!).

McCracken has details:

I propose that a condition of a council opting out of the MDRS, in whole or just in certain suburbs, should be the requirement to introduce Graduated Density Zoning6(GDZ) to residential land that is zoned below three storeys. GDZ is where, when a developer buys neighbouring sites totaling more than the set threshold, e.g. 1400m2, they can automatically build to a higher density. The details of that can be debated but I believe GDZ should be introduced to enable better housing choice and new supply in every neighbourhood. While resource consent would be required, once the threshold has been met, three-storey apartments and terraced houses would become a permitted activity.

Adopting GDZ could provide several key benefits:

• Larger sites can make it easier to manage the externalities of greater density, which have been some of the driving reasons behind the backlash towards the MDRS. This should see fewer sausage flats on single sites, which generally have poor design outcomes and interaction with neighbouring sites. Larger amalgamated sites will enable greater master planning that considers the interaction of outlook spaces with neighbouring properties, limiting driveway crossings and the design of open and communal spaces.
• It enables the market to deliver greater density in areas of high demand and better match this with new supply. While councils can plan through future development strategies for ‘enough’ capacity to meet future demand, this is always based on a range of assumptions, which can never be completely accurate. Amenities and accessibility of an area, along with personal preferences, can change shifting demand greatly. We should design our system to be more responsive and flexible to meet demand. GDZ would be a step towards this.
• Enabling three storeys, as I have discussed many times previously, can enable greater housing choice to be provided. It also enables ageing in place, where you can find housing suited to your needs at different stages of your life within the same neighbourhood.
• It’s worth noting that this can also benefit neighbouring landowners, who could choose to sell together to seek greater profit, which is possible as an amalgamated site is generally a better development opportunity. This has occurred previously, including in Te Atatū Peninsula in 2020.

Until or unless the RMA is abolished, this could be a start.

Auckland: Where "confusion" is the leitmotif

 

Auckland's houses were built in the main by spec builders. If you're living in a house in Auckland, chances are you're enjoying the payoff of someone who saw profit in the equation Selling-Price = Land-Cost + Build-Cost + Profit.

To make houses affordable in Auckland essentially means making it safe again for spec builders to make those profits.

Instead, as costs rise and selling prices fall that profit margin has been rapidly disappearing, and life for Auckland's spec builders has been made both unprofitable and more uncertain.

Make no mistake: Even when the money is there, to plan a development years ahead needs certainty.

But consider: In recent years would-be developers and spec builders faced up to the changes from Auckland's many different District plans to one overarching Unitary Plan. Big changes, still being absorbed.

While still absorbing those however, they then had to then confront the changes announced by the bipartisan Medium Density Residential Standards (MRDS) and National Policy Statement - Urban Development (NPS-UD) -- both of which liberalised what you can do on your land, but still causing massive uncertainty.

As a measure of just how much uncertainty, on one isthmus site I'm working on, the difference between the old days and today amounts to the difference between being allowed to build five houses to being able to build around twenty-five. That's a big change.

But it's not there yet: Auckland is still holding hearings on what it calls Plan Change 78 [PC78] to give effect to all those acronyms above.

But those hearings are paused. They are paused to introduce intensification rules while Auckland Council investigates Labour's "Light Rail Corridor," and responds to recent storm events.

That Light Right Corridor alone amounts to massive uncertainty all along its proposed route.

But there's more: While those hearings for the PC78 changes are paused, adding to the uncertainty is the National Party's brain explosion last month that they're now going to backtrack on their support for the bipartisan MRDS, instead announcing who knows what. (And the ACT Party are foolishly supporting them.)

To add even more uncertainty, Auckland Council released its own Future Development Strategy (FDS) last week which lays out its  own "big-picture vision" for "how and where Auckland should grow over the next 30 years." As if they would know. 

The FDS updates the Council’s previous Future Urban Land Supply Strategy 2017, and calls for more development close to the city centre, and much less development on the fringes. This could involve down-zoning city fringe land from so-called Future Urban back to a non-urban zone.

The key areas where  these changes to zoning have been indicated are said to be Kumeu/Huapai, Drury, Takanini and Hatfields Beach. Other areas under investigation are Warkworth, Dairy Flat, Wainui East, Upper Orewa, Riverhead, Albany Village and Oruarangi.

Contrast this with National's now-stated aim, if elected, to make it harder to build near city centres, and less challenging to build out on the fringes. So this might mean upzoning city-fringe land. Land in places like Kumeu/Huapai, Drury, Takanini and Hatfields Beach etc.

Are you keeping up?

Because your city's spec builders are supposed to.

And this is all called "planning." What a joke.

National promises more housing uncertainty [updated]

 

DESPITE RISING INTEREST RATES and falling housing demand, New Zealand remains in the grip of its decades-long housing affordability crisis. 

“New Zealand is not short of land," said National's Chris Bishop yesterday, "but restrictive planning rules and a broken funding system have driven up the price of land and housing, creating a social and economic disaster."

He said this while announcing National would backtrack on its own bi-partisan policy to free up restrictive planning rules just a little bit in New Zealand's most unaffordable cities -- a policy that has already been successfully introduced, in association with the Labour govt, and operating for nearly a year. Those new "3-storey" density standards (called MRDS) are a blunt instrument, sure, but they allow city property owners to build taller housing in greater densities in larger numbers than ever before. They have been the only relaxation of restrictive planning rules since ... anyone can remember. And Bishop wants to overturn that.

What a fuckwit.

The MRDS standards were finally introduced only last year -- and more houses and apartments are already being planned and built and lived in under those new standards -- building up instead of out -- buyers seeing large falls in prices for entry-level dwellings, consistent with increased supply enabled by the MDRS and related changes. 

In the way of these things however, with the uncertainty this policy announcement will now make, almost all that planning will now stop while everyone waits to see what happens now -- with all the further implications for housing unaffordability.

What a complete fuckwit.

Christopher Bishop is backed up in this fuckwittery by both his leader, Christopher Luxon, who signalled the backtrack last week ("I think we've got the MRDS wrong," said the fuckwit), and by the leader of the opposition David Seymour, who on this issue abandons his pseudo-liberalism and becomes instead the "Minister for More Rules and Restrictions" -- and by Seymour's thoroughly confused deputy Brooke van Velden who says "The right answer is to leave planning to councils."

What a pack of total fuckwits. NIMBYs to a man and woman.

No news yet on how National's deputy thinks about all this, who's just been thoroughly undermined, i..e., Nicola Willis, who co-sponsored these relaxed density standards with Labour's Megan Woods -- a rare dose of bipartisanship and possibly the only good move on housing any politician has made in at least half a century. So good that all politicians bar those from ACT's illiberal wing could support it.

Oh yes, Bishop couched his announcement of backtracking on relaxing restrictions within cities with a policy to have planners "release" some land on green fields outside them*. Building more out instead of up. Eventually. (And probably easily averted by the planners' art.) But he's hanging his hat on the headline writer's spin that something is being done.**

National has form on this. Before he was elected as Prime Minister, National's John Key announced he would "improve housing affordability by ... changing the building regulatory regime ... and [fix] the Resource Management Act." And voters believed him. Of course, once appointed, that fuckwit did no such thing, watching instead as house prices soared, and planning and building restrictions mounted -- and he was heard to declare that the house price inflation he had helped create would "fix" the leaky homes crisis by inflating it all away.

Who cared what that did for first-home buyers. Certainly not the Prime Minister.

SO WITH HOUSING ONCE again a political football, we await an election to sort out which fuckwits where get to tell us where and how we're allowed to build, planning rules in and around our city are once again completely up in the air -- as they were while we awaited certainty around the MRDS. And without that certainty, it's impossible for developers and builders to make real plans, uncertain as they are as to how council's planners might be allowed to curtail them.

Sure, freeing up any land or planning restrictions anywhere will help housing affordability eventually. But it's not clear that the Christophers' city-edge botch-up is the solution, even if it were to free up anything at all.

Up or out? Why not both.

And why give those planners any bloody power at all?

* * * * 

* Bishop's policy is to require planners "to zone land for 30 years’ worth of housing demand." Those measuring whether this is achieved will be the same planners who wrote the rezoning rules - making it easy for planners to avoid. And he ignores that simply "releasing" land on its own does not necessarily make land cheaper.

The RMA's requirement for planners to undertake a cost-benefit analysis before writing new rules, easily fudged, and Auckland Council's continued fudging over the MRDS requirements demonstrates on their own how easy it is for planners to wriggle around these kind of requirements, and how willing councils will be to back them up.

UPDATE

** And Auckland Councillors are already "confirming" that no new land will be rezoned as a result of this -- the Auckland Unitary Plan, they say, already has all that Bishop asks for.

Auckland's "Character Protection Racket"

"In response to last year’s legislation supporting increased density near urban centres and public transport hubs, Auckland Council has excluded central city suburbs from the plan under the guise of ‘special character’ ... protecting affluent inner-city neighbourhoods and forcing much-needed development further out... flailing desperately to ensure that the kinds of walkable, accessible lives it trumpeted in 2016 are mostly reserved for the city’s most affluent citizens....
    "[Council-imposed] character protections cover 41% of the residential land within five kilometres of the city centre. That percentage rises in city-adjacent suburbs, reaching 94% in Grey Lynn Central and 91% in Ponsonby East. The restrictions have choked growth near rapid transit, including along the future route of the City Rail Link. Around 80% of properties are subject to restrictions in central Mt Eden and near Eden Park. Nearly 70% are cut off from dense development in Kingsland, which is also expected to be a key link in the government’s planned light rail line. In the city’s best-located suburbs, the gates are locked tight...
    "Scott Caldwell, a spokesperson for the pro-density Coalition for More Homes, says he wouldn’t have minded if the council had tried to protect a few high-quality, architecturally or historically significant streets. But the sheer extent of the council’s proposed protections makes the proposal unfair and likely illegal, he says. 'It’s 3% of the overall city but 90% of the most desirable places to live if you want a compact city. The harm is that no one gets to live there apart from the people who already do, and anyone who’s lucky enough to inherit one of their houses'....
    "[I]n planning terms ‘character’ is a council invention, and its parameters are vague. Even council planning committee chair Chris Darby struggles to deliver a concise explanation. 'It’s groups of buildings, architecture that reflects periods of history,' he says. 'It’s representative of areas. It’s architectural style that tells a story of the past.' Albany councillor Wayne Walker offers an even more wide-ranging interpretation: “It’s a whole lot of things and it’s going to vary somewhat from place to place'....
    "Instead of genuine heritage, many housing advocates see character areas as a historical homage, similar to the former colonial streetscape exhibit at Auckland War Memorial Museum. Oscar Sims of the Coalition for More Homes calls them 'the worst of both worlds' — cutting off intensification while failing to preserve either historic integrity or original built forms. [West Auckland Councilllor] Shane Henderson says they amount to 'fake historical areas.' Wellington councillor Tamatha Paul (Ngāti Awa, Tainui) has proposed renaming them 'colonial streetscape precincts.
    "The rules governing [these living museum pieces] often restrict new development to lower densities than what already exists. Many of Auckland’s villas and bungalows were built before council planning rules — they’re close together, they shade each other, they’re on small sections. You literally couldn’t rebuild many of them under the rules designed to protect them, which enforce, among other things, height-to-boundary ratios, side set- backs and a 600m2 minimum plot size ... proof that character areas are aimed at warding off new buildings rather than protecting old ones. [Architectural designer Jade] Kake says the people defending those rules generally benefit from an inequitable status quo. 'If they were living in insecure housing, or in really poor-quality housing, or if they were experiencing fuel poverty, and they’re trying to get across the city, or their kids were sick because they’re living in shitty homes, I think they might advocate a different position'.
    "Peter Nunns, director of economics at Te Waihanga New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, says character areas are part of a 50-year history of council development restrictions that have put homes out of reach for many Aucklanders. 'They’re essentially a continuation of 1970s district schemes which cut capacity for growth,' he says. 'So the predecessor to the special character area policy has really been at the heart of our housing affordability crisis.' Character advocates say even if you built apartments in places like Grey Lynn, they’d likely be expensive. Nunns says a large body of international research shows all new housing supply helps affordability, including at the more luxury end of the market, and high land values in character areas indicate a huge amount of constrained development potential.
    "He has local stats to back that up. His research demonstrates house prices nationwide would be 69% lower if it weren’t for council-enforced density limits, along with the resulting inefficient, car-centric layout of our cities. When it comes to Auckland, though, Nunns’ interest is personal. His great-grandfather built some of the villas in Ponsonby and Devonport. 'So, from a family taonga perspective, I can see the appeal of this connection with the past.' Nunns doesn’t let that define his views on developing those areas, however, because he knows his great-granddad wasn’t trying to build wooden monuments for generations to come; he was trying to meet his family’s needs. People who want to set down roots today deserve the same opportunity, he says. 'If I told my ancestors we can’t meet our current housing needs because we’re protecting what they built 100 years ago, I suspect that their answer might be that we’re missing the point'."
          ~ Hayden Donnell, from his article 'The Character Protection Racket'

Get behind it!

 

In a bipartisan (and utterly surprising announcement yesterday, four MPs from opposite sides of the House* announced that any government in which they play a part will, within ten months, allow any land owner to build on that land three houses of up to 11m each WITHOUT A RESOURCE CONSENT -- and will be legislating to ensure councils don't fuck it up.

This is astonishing...**

* * * * 

* * * * 

... so astonishing that, for the first time in my life***, I congratulated a bunch of politicians!

Yes, there are risks...

... but even planners are excited (though sober)!

* * * * 

Even Green Party people are excited (I think)...

Oddly, the only one not publicly excited is ACT's David Seymour who said, on behalf of his Epsom constituents, that many of them had bought in expectation of the rules in their leafy streets remaining the same; and that if Gummint relaxes rules on housing then Gummint should pay for the increased infrastructure required. 

But (as David knows) these are not genuine objections.

* * * * 

* Megan Woods (LAB), Nicola Willis (NAT), David Parker (LAB) and Judith Collins (NAT).

** Not as astonishing as what I first heard however, which is that any land owner could build on that land three houses of up to 11m each WITHOUT ANY CONSENT WHATSOEVER! 

***