Urban Limits under threat

The “urban sprawl” versus “compact city” debate has long been a great interest of mine. In fact I wrote my Master’s thesis on the topic – “From Urban Sprawl to Compact City? An analysis of Auckland’s growth management strategies“. There’s a lengthy article in the NZ Herald today on the topic, and on the proposed legislative changes seem to be directing Auckland away from its focus on intensification (the ‘compact city’ approach) and more back towards sprawl, or greenfields development. Here are some interesting extracts:

A suite of reforms planned by the Government will make it easier for Hugh Green and others sitting on rural land encircling Auckland to convert them into houses – gobbling up more countryside.

The reform package will apply nationally but is aimed at smashing through the roadblocks which thwart development of our most populous city.

It’s arcane sounding stuff – reforms to the Resource Management Act, spatial plans, relaxing the metropolitan limits … But the new planning framework will affect where people will live, how we’ll get around and the type of housing we live in: Separate house and garden or higher density apartments? Motorways or public transport? Good or bad urban design?

If the Government gets it right, it will be easier to get projects off the ground, from houses to new motorways and public transport.

But casualties along the way could include environmental damage, higher infrastructure costs, even worse traffic congestion, community input and social problems if low cost housing is concentrated on the outskirts.

Environment Minister Nick Smith has appointed two advisory panels to recommend changes to the Resource Management Act. Coupled with a further reform bill on Auckland’s governance, the changes will shape the planning rulebook which the single Auckland council will work from.

Announcing the panels – one will look at urban design, the other infrastructure – Smith linked restrictive zoning and consent laws to New Zealand’s poor productivity and economic growth.

High on the hit list is the use of metropolitan urban limits to contain growth. The Government blames these lines on a map – residential land on one side, rural on the other – for pushing up house prices inside the boundaries. It believes making more land available will drive down the cost of land and make houses more affordable.

That’s a major change to the policy of urban containment agreed to by Auckland councils in 1999. The Regional Growth Strategy was supposed to guide the city’s development for 50 years. It attempts to limit sprawl by housing 70 per cent of population growth within the urban limits. The aim was to limit the environmental costs of sprawl and preserve open space while building a more efficient city which supported public transport.

But the strategy demanded more intensive housing – apartments and units – than New Zealanders accustomed to a house-and-garden lifestyle are used to. And successive Governments have been slow to fund the much-needed public transport investments.

One of the central themes of my thesis was that while sprawl is certainly very bad from a sustainability perspective, it certainly appears to have many individual benefits – you get a large house on a fairly large piece of land, and so on and so forth. Essentially we end up with a collective action problem, that individually sprawl is attractive, but when everyone lives in sprawl situations we all lose out – through traffic congestion, auto-dependency (although as Paul Mees suggests this is largely due to poor transport policy too), the loss of countryside around our cities, highly inefficient infrastructure expenditure due to low densities and generally a lack of vibrant, interesting communities. When I visit Auckland’s newer suburbs they exhibit a sense of soullessness that you just don’t get in higher density, more mixed-use areas.

So it’s certainly understandable why Auckland has chosen to head down the path of becoming a ‘compact city’ over the past decade, and certainly the city has sprawled more slowly. The problem is that, for a number of reasons, this hasn’t been counter-balanced by the required number of additional houses being built within the existing urban area. In some areas there has been community opposition to intensification, on other occasions I think that intensification has been stymied by District Planning documents that are completely and utterly inadequate and out of date (Auckland City Council’s District Plan is the most striking example of this). There has also probably been a lack of incentives for intensification, with many “development contributions” being levied on a per-unit basis – hardly encouraging developers to use their land most efficiently. There have also been more direct problems, like the collapse of finance companies making it difficult for developers to fund their projects, or the difficulties associated with amalgamating sufficient areas of land within existing cities to actually construct a decent-sized development of apartments, town-houses or terraced housing. Our transport policies, which continue to promote sprawl through motorway building, rather than promoting intensification through projects like the CBD Rail Tunnel, have also contributed to the problem.

The combination of choking off sprawl through the urban limits, while also not sufficiently providing for intensification, has meant that Auckland has built an insufficient number of houses over the past decade – with the result being a dramatic rise in property prices. So Housing Minister Phil Heatley is quite justified when he is saying this:

Housing minister Phil Heatley: “Our drive comes from the fact that property prices have increased hugely in the last five years and locked out first home buyers. And the biggest proportion has been the land cost, not the cost of building.”

Certainly if you look at the value of most properties in Auckland – particularly standalone dwellings – around 70% or more is in the land. But really, that’s not surprising because generally each dwelling has so much land. If you have an inner-suburban area that’s attractive to live in, and there’s a single house with 800 square metres or so of land around it, of course it’s the land which is going to be so valuable. The fact that the land value is so high is probably a pretty good indicator that the land is being used inefficiently, and perhaps there should be two or three dwellings on the site. Now that might not always be an appropriate outcome – for heritage, amenity and various other reasons, but I don’t think we should be surprised that land-value is such a high proportion of a site’s value. It’s sending a message that generally we should probably be building to higher densities to make better use of the land and bring the proportion of value back down to something more reasonable – 50% perhaps?

The article points out that it might not all be bad news though:

The reforms will require councils to produce a Spatial Plan (in Auckland’s case, replacing the Regional Growth Strategy) as the blueprint for the timing and location of development including housing, industry, commerce and infrastructure such as roading.Terms of reference for the urban advisory panel include housing affordability, urban design, the urban limits, infrastructure funding, and spatial and structure plans. The infrastructure panel will look at streamlining the process of designating land for public works such as roading – or alternatives to designations.Smith says development levies – where councils charge developers for the cost of extending services such as roading and water supplies – are another focus. “Set them too high and it affects affordability. Set too low you provide an artificial subsidy from existing ratepayers.”

Environmental Defence Society chairman Gary Taylor says the behind the scenes work represents both an opportunity and a threat. “It’s an opportunity to collapse this cumbersome hierarchy of planning instruments that we have in Auckland into a more coherent, simple, user-friendly, effective set of instruments.

“We could go from cumbersome complexity to simple effectiveness. At the moment we have a national policy statement, regional policy statement, regional plan, regional coastal plan and district plans – it’s enormously complicated.

“The threat is that whatever is done creates a regime in which urban sprawl is let loose. That would be a disaster for the environment and would add cost to our urban growth. The urban area would lose form, shape and attractiveness – that would be a third world outcome for Auckland.”

In some cases an extension of the urban limits might well be justified, and hopefully this Spatial Plan will provide a robust mechanism for working out where it makes sense to do just that. I must say I’ve always wondered why Flat Bush is within the MUL – considering it’s nowhere near any motorway or railway line – whereas the area around Waitakere township, Taupaki, north Westgate and Kumeu/Huapai is outside the limits – when they have a railway line, have pretty good access to both State Highway 16 and State Highway 18 and so forth. So there’s certainly some fine-tuning that could happen here. I certainly agree with Gary Taylor though that if sprawl is simply let loose the outcomes will be pretty terrible. You’ll end up with random leap-frog development that is not properly integrated with infrastructure development and will not necessarily avoid areas of environmental sensitivity.

Once again, I think it comes down to how you do it. It should also be pointed out that while extending urban limits may improve housing affordability, a lot of the ‘gain’ is likely to be offset by other costs which will increase. Sprawling, low-density cities tend to spend a much greater proportion of their wealth on transport than more compact and mixed-use cities. Also, providing infrastructure to urban sprawl is more expensive because the infrastructure is simply used less efficiently. At a basic level, it’s cheaper to lay one big fat pipe than 50 skinny pipes. This is pointed out below:

ARC planning chairman Paul Walbran says he’s all for making red tape easier. “There are numerous examples where getting consent is much harder than it needs to be. But that shouldn’t be a Trojan horse for getting more rabbit hutch apartments and that sort of thing.

“A coherent spatial plan is certainly a must if we’re going to get the kind of Auckland we need.”

But he says the proposition that pushing out the urban limits will lead to cheaper housing is a fallacy. “The overall cost of living will substantially rise. The further out the city sprawls the more extensive its infrastructure has to be and the less efficient it is. The cost of transport rises substantially – that’s well documented everywhere.

“Metropolitan limits are a nice simple tool that keep growth in a city coordinated – keeping an adequate supply of land saves ad hoc development that’s disconnected and takes people a lot longer to get to and from. It’s all about wanting an efficient liveable city that works. One that doesn’t stuff up its environment.”

It seems the government isn’t convinced though.

But Smith and Heatley clearly don’t buy the arguments which underpin the regional growth strategy and the compact city approach.

“There’s a bit of naivety in policy thinking around metropolitan urban limits in assuming you can drive urban intensification against community wishes,” says Smith.

Communities in Auckland and Nelson have reacted negatively to intensive housing applications, he says. Planners have made flawed assumptions about the extent of intensification, grossly over-estimating the number of new housing units that could be provided.

“All that happens is that you drive up section prices with quite major flow-on economic impacts for both housing affordability and the property bubble which has been quite damaging to the economy over the last decade.

“It’s true we need some intensification but you need to be realistic in a democratic society about the degree of central planning edicts that you can get away with.”

I do think we need to look at reasons why there has been opposition to intensification. A lot of what has been built has been crap (which ironically is because most intensification has been built within business zones, due to the lack of provision for intensification in residential zones) and the ‘leaky-buildings’ crisis hasn’t helped. I also think that many architects, planners and developers simply don’t quite “get” how to build decent intensification. In a place like Auckland why does intensification have to so often be rubbish apartments? Why do we build so few terraced houses, even though that’s the type of intensification that is most likely to fit in with the New Zealand culture?

The last portion of the article provides a bit of relief for those, like me, worried that the reforms will result in a sprawlfest:

GETTING THE RIGHT MIX: THE VISION FOR AUCKLAND

Will it mean urban Auckland sprawls from Orewa to Pukekohe, from Kumeu to Clevedon?

It won’t be as crude as simply rubbing out the boundary lines to allow a fire sale of rural land, Government ministers promise.

“We see the metropolitan urban limits as sensibly constraining development in some parts of Auckland but in other areas it’s nonsense and we want to have a look at that,” says Housing Minister Phil Heatley.

Environment Minister Nick Smith is similarly equivocal. “We’re not necessarily opposed to metropolitan urban limits but if we’re going to have them we need to be realistic … Our cities need to be able to accommodate a growing population.”

The Regional Growth Strategy calls for about 70 per cent of population growth to be accommodated within the city limits and 30 per cent beyond – in satellite towns, lifestyle blocks and on greenfield sites.

But Smith won’t be drawn on how the mix might look in future, the extent to which boundaries will be loosened – and where.

“I can’t say how things will shift – it’s too early in the process to identify that. These issues are hugely complex. At central Government level it’s about getting the framework and the incentives right. We want these technical groups to kick the tyres on some of the assumptions which have been previously made and to take on board the sort of analysis that’s been done by Motu Research and provide a path forward.

“Nor does the Government intend to dictate what that balance will be. We would rather provide a new framework in which Auckland’s council can make those decisions.”

Heatley says the move to spatial planning will help the new council to better guide Auckland’s development.

“This is not about slash and burn. We want to sensibly zone areas for residential land supply.”We need to identify which areas are suitable for development and which are not. And it’s very important the local community has a say.”

Does this spell doom for the compact city – where people live in apartments or terraced housing within easy reach of public transport or can walk to work?

The Government says no. A combination of unified planning rules, streamlined RMA processes and urban design guidelines should make it easier for developers to progress intensive housing proposals which are more warmly received by locals, says Smith.

He tips a move away from the adversarial approach to resource consent applications, of “a more collaborative approach between developers and councils with better urban design guidelines” leading to a streamlined consenting process. Communities will still get a say, he says.

Heatley says the Government hasn’t picked camps in the let-it-sprawl vs compact city debate. “We think we should approach it from two directions.”

The advisory panels’ focus on easing the consent process will make it easier to build on land already zoned for housing and to increase density.

Spatial planning will ensure councils zone enough land for future building work. “There really needs to be 10 years’ forward supply.”

Heatley rejects ARC research that predicts Auckland has 15 years’ supply left before it needs to find additional space for housing. “We have never accepted the ARC’s sums in the way they calculate how much land is available. They often include large sections when the owners have no intention of subdividing.”

“Councils need to provide more residential [housing] and to plan for it, rather than [having] a mindset of ‘how do we restrict it?”‘

Smith is critical of planners and policymakers who believe New Zealanders can be persuaded to change their preference for a separate house and garden lifestyle.

“There’s a bit of naivety among some of the planning community that they can somehow impose on our suburbs their view of the world and if only they had greater legal power they could deal with the opposition of those communities.”

One could also say there’s a naivety amongst politicians to not change anything, in the face of looming environmental (climate change) and resource (peak oil) crises over the next few decades.

As an aside, does anyone else get the feeling that the ARC, and everything it has done on land-use and transport matters, seems to be particularly in the firing line lately?