With the Auckland Plan now completed, it seems as though Auckland Council’s focus has shifted onto a critical document in actually achieving the land-use changes outlined in the Plan through, unsurprisingly, yet another plan – this time one called the “Unitary Plan”. While it may seem like an endless process of creating extremely pretty doorstops, the Unitary Plan is a really really important document because of its legal weight. It becomes the core document which gives effect to the Resource Management Act, and the RMA is the key piece of legislation that guides the way in which Auckland will develop over time – regulating the way land is used.
The Unitary Plan will replace the existing District Plans of all the previous Councils, as well as the Regional Policy Statement and other Regional Plans that were administered by the former ARC. As Auckland City Council alone had three District Plans and I’m not even sure how many regional plans there were, this is a huge number of documents to roll together into one. A report going to one of the Council’s committees this week gives a useful update on what progress has been made on the Unitary Plan in recent months, as well as giving some hints over the thinking around a few key issues. The key issues looked at in the report are listed below:
Of most interest, in terms of this blog, are issues around integration with the Draft Auckland Plan (hopefully now they’re looking at the final version!) density, the Rural Urban Boundary and new settlements. These all potentially have a pretty massive impact on transport as they influence where growth is likely to happen, to what extent and with what timing – all of which have transport implications.
Looking first at implications of the Auckland Plan, there are a few interesting matters highlighted – although once again I hope that the thinking has shifted onto the final Auckland Plan as there are some pretty dramatic differences in terms of where growth is likely to happen. Here’s what the report says:
Of particular interest is the reference to car parking standards. The Auckland Plan (both the draft and final versions) sends out a pretty strong message that a completely new approach needs to be taken to parking standards – particularly in relation to the removal of unnecessary regulation which inhibits intensification, obviously being those nefarious minimum parking requirements. Here’s what is said in the Urban Chapter of the Auckland Plan:
Inappropriate regulations and inflexible standards can impact negatively on good design. They impede the development of more intensive housing and mixed developments. For example, at times traditional parking standards (minimum numbers of car parking spaces) are imposed in areas where alternative options (parking buildings or investment in public transportation) imply that such minimums are counterproductive to delivering the goal of intensification, mixed use and affordability. The Auckland Council intends to review its approach to parking, as part of the development of the Unitary Plan
There’s also a specific Directive on the issue:
Directive 10.6
Parking standards and innovative parking mechanisms should take account of multiple objectives, including the need to:
- facilitate intensive and mixed-use developments within strategic locations
- improve housing affordability
- reduce development costs
- encourage use of public transportation
- optimise investments in public parking facilities, civic amenities and centre developments
- foster safe, convenient and attractive walkable neighbourhoods.
As minimum parking requirements undermine every single one of these mechanisms, it seems as though there’s a good chance the Unitary Plan could do away with them altogether, which would be simply fantastic.
Moving along, another really interesting thing in the Unitary Plan update is mention of a possible new approach to controlling density:
This seems to pick up on an argument strongly made by this blog’s former admin, that density controls have weirdly perverse outcomes like allowing a house with 400 square metres of floorspace (utterly huge), but not allowing that same floorspace to be split into two or three dwelling units. Once again the new approach seems to be pretty promising, if it can get through the process and become a reality.
Setting of the Rural Urban Boundary seems like something the Council will take its time over, which seems pretty sensible as it’s important to get right. There were some pretty big red boxes in the Auckland Plan’s development strategy – scarily large in many cases and I’m sure there are parts of those boxes where development just isn’t feasible or desirable for one reason or another:
Finally, one particularly interesting thing mentioned in the report is around the way in which the Unitary Plan will be published. It seems as though it won’t really be a document to be generally looked at in hard copy – but rather much more of an interactive online tool. Given the possible physical size of the document, this seems like a sensible approach:
Ultimately, it seems to me that there are a few key things the Unitary Plan must do in order to contribute to a more balanced transport future in Auckland. These are:
- Get rid of minimum parking requirements. Everywhere.
- Allow for significantly higher intensity developments at key points along the rail corridor – to support the investment in the rail network.
- Make it easier to get resource consent for a well designed higher density development than to get consent for more ubiquitous urban sprawl
- Incentivise good things, like providing less parking, making some units “affordable housing”, setting aside land for open space or locating next to a train station, by offering up more floor space than would otherwise be allowed.
It seems like thing are heading in the right direction though, which is promising.
I think the hopeful abolition of minimum parking requirements deserves more attention – perhaps its own blog post. Call it “Handing parking policy over to the free market”
There needs to be some way to make demolishing existing houses easier so that they can be replaced with higher density buildings. For some reason people get upset when developers bowl anything over 50 years old but it needs to happen for housing affordability. It will be interesting to see how well the council follows through with “heritage” buildings vs following their new plan.
I’d have to ask why we need to bowl any houses? There is a heap of brownfields sites around, plus old commercial units, open air carparks and plenty of things like car sales yards, hirepool outlets and the like along our main roads and in our town centres. There’s a heap that could be done before we need to think about bowling houses.
What Nick said.
There are so many gaping holes (even in the middle of town) that it will be quite a while before we have to even think about bulldozers.
Just BTW, has anyone done a post along the lines of “A million extra people? Did you just pull that out of your arse or do you have a solid case?”.
It came up at the Auckland/Unitary Plan Committee meeting on Tuesday morning.
Penny Hulse or someone admitted they were using the absolute highest possible numbers scenario that came from some study a way back…
I think Mr P is winding you up Nick…. Of course there is no need to flatten existing housing stock but some neurotic villa fetishists are obsessed by the idea that ennabling apartments on inderused parking lots or low value commercial sites somehow means them being forced out of their homes at gun point..
I don’t know Patrick, there are plenty of people around who think the only way to achieve inward growth is to raze suburbs.
Not by any of the people in favour of intensification only in the minds of the fearful and ill-informed in my experience.
Historically the reverse is true of course, the only destruction of old or if you prefer ‘heritage’ homes on any scale in Auckland all occurred in the name of de-intensification in fact- motorway building. As we have shown on this site much of the appeal of Victorian inner city suburbs is their intensity. This idea of urban versus heritage is a lazy but convenient distraction. It is Sprawl that threatens heritage by demanding the sacrifice of older communities for the convenient transit of distant suburbanites in cars right through the guts of these areas and through the dissipation of economic activity away from the centre and scattered out to the freshly ruined countryside.
I don’t know how you plan to any serious long term intensification of the inner suburbs without removing the old houses.
Seriously.
Sure you can get some intensification with spare land, etc, or subdividing what hasn’t already been subdivided, but eventually any serious intensification will require replacing an old villa with a house designed for dense living.
This is a good thing, and i’m all for it, but for some this is a contentious issue and it will be interesting to see how the council addresses it — being that their new plan should be encouraging (or at least allowing) it.
Personally I believe any building should be able to be bowled even if it is “historical” with the only caveat being what you replace it with has to be of good “quality” of architecture.
Publius. I think you are barking up the wrong tree for several reasons:
1. Victorian areas are already quite intense- ie they’re doing a fine job, in other words they don’t need much more intensity
2. Mostly these houses are too valuable to replace
3. People like them
4. All of Great North Rd for example, Jervois and Ponsonby ridges can easily accommodate 4, 5, 6, stories but not the res streets behind
5. Then there are all the single story crappy commercial brownfields sites on the rail corridors….
Basically no need to demolish freeman’s Bay or whatever you have in mind… do explain?
I don’t see why we need to demolish villas in, say Kingsland, when in Moningside there is about 160,000m2 of tin roofed warehouses and old concrete industrial units nestled between a rapid transit station and a big shopping centre.
It would be a lot easier to acquire and demolish two warehouses than twenty villas, an a hell of a lot cheaper.
I’m with Publius. Buildings should be judged on their merits. Age is one of them. But it shouldn’t trump other merits, and the past should inform but not define our present and future.
There are a lot of people in NZ who want to continue living out a pretty, potted, post-colonial past, and see fit to foist that vision on a city of 1.5m going on 2.5m people. Am I saying we should raze Parnell? No. I don’t think Publius is either. Should we be free to intensify and destroy where necessary? Yes. Cities are living things, and every ancient city is layered with what was once new construction on historic rubble. With guidance from legislation and councils, the best from every era wins out.
Let’s imagine that this approach was applied to railway infrastructure. New trains would be allowed, but only if existing ones were kept, and minimal upgrades or adjustment to the old units allowed. The signalling is heritage, and should not be demolished. Stations could not be constructed on the sites of existing ones. Yes, it isn’t this bad in housing and commercial property: because we can keep building on farmland. We can have the best of things. But we can’t have it all.
Also note that they’re looking at enabling existing houses to be split into multiple units by not having density controls. More than anything else that should ease pressure to demolish old buildings as you can intensify while keeping them. It’s a win win.
Peter- That’s a great solve.
We’ve been pushing for Bethany Centre in Grey Lynn to be chopped into 4 or 5 flats. Character building saved, density right up, no complaints from neighbours.
Unfortunately Council doesn’t like that idea, they’d rather let the developer get rid of the house and chop the land into 500+m2 sections and put a one family house on each.
Not sure how this is “increasing density” though…
Isn’t that exactly what increasing density is? Putting 4-5 houses on a block of land that currently holds 1?
Not neessarily. Density usually measures people, not dwellings. A big house with ten flatmates replaced with five houses with couples would be exactly the same density.
shame about Bethany the guys are demolishing it now as we speak. Looks like the whole line about it being moved off the land and being saved was just rubbish.. Another significant building goes under the bulldozers
Yes shame on the joke that is Auckland Heritage, shame on the Council in general as well as locally. There’s a real conflict of interest story going on there, but I can’t say more without lawyering up…
Another sad day for heritage and another huge failure in planning!
Mind you, the Philistines will be thrilled
Splitting single houses is a pretty good idea. That might be a way to get a lot of intensification within a relatively short period of time.
I was reading an article in a recent Listener which looked at why building in NZ is so expensive. One of the interesting graphs highlighted how freaking massive the houses we’re building are – when compared to many overseas countries. Something like 200 square metres being the average size of every new house. In the UK the average size of a new dwelling is about a quarter of that.
I suspect that the reason we’re building such massive houses is because of our density controls. If you can only build one unit per lot, and the land of that lot is pretty expensive, you’re going to build a really massive and expensive house to ensure you can make a profit. If you are able to easily build 2-3 units on that lot you might be able to make even more money while providing greater density and also providing more affordable housing.
Getting rid of density controls is probably the most important thing we can do to improve housing affordability.
KLK putting 5 houses on small sections results in a poor design outcome, as I bet none of these houses will have backyards, apart from carparks, and a several metre wasted slither around the outside. However the plan makes this outcome easy, rather than other much preferable outcomes that would be higher density and higher amenity.
Building apartment on the caryards of Great North Road etc will be the main focus of intensification in the CBD and surrounding town centres. However also need to think about the wider suburbia outside the area of character housing, especially near suburban train stations.
Difficult to get good outcomes using NZs standard section sizes, is actually much easier using 2 or 3 neighbouring sections. The best opportunities for this are probably housing NZ areas, as most other areas have been subdivided already. Original quarter acre sections are few and far between despite the rhetoric of the freedom fighters, even new subdivision on the edge of the city limits.
That’ll be the part of Great North Rd that just had John Andrew Ford change into a Bigger John Andrew Ford. Oh and a Bunnings is going in too.
Sometimes I wish Planning would talk with Planning.
Bunningses, like most of those buildings, are big cheap sheds surrounded by carparking. In other words: strategic land bank.
All current developments are using the old District Plans to guide them. As the post says, the Council is formulating a whole new Unitary Plan which presumably will allow much higher densities along this section of Great North Road, plus might have a few other tricks in the bag to ensure intensification happens – like minimum density controls (i.e. you can’t build anything less than x floors), zoning which slowly squeezes out current uses (upzoning will achieve this as the land value will go nuts) and amenity standards that car yards may struggle to meet.
I wasn’t necessarily advocating for it, but Nick’s clarification puts Geoff’s comment on desnity into more light (people, not necessarily dwellings)
I tend to think that terraced housing is a huge opportunity in Auckland. Still gives people a backyard and a piece of the world that’s clearly theirs, and can be a fee simple ownership which means no body corporate fees, yet you can get some pretty high densities out of terraced housing too.
The most recently built bits of Stonefields are full of terraced houses.
I agree, terraced housing would be a good idea for many reasons.
It saves the useless slivers of land that would otherwise surround individual dwellings on small sections.
It gets rid of height to boundary & shading problems between neighbors.
It allows a dwelling to be built on a smaller portion of land, reducing cost.
It reduces building & maintenance costs, having less exterior walls, fences.
It is more thermally efficient, reduced or no heat loss through common walls.
The view from windows is better, as there are none that look directly at a neighbors house, 2m away.
I don’t know if the council has the power to do this but I think ideally it would also create some kind of arm of itself that would be empowered to design and contract out big developments. So, for example, developments on big sites like the old Lion Nathan’s Brewery in Newmarket, that have the potential to really shape the city, would be managed by a unitary planning authority that would lay down what they wanted, then hold a design competition, then get it built and so on.
The Australian states have such organisations, for example VicUrban in Victoria. WHere is our Auckland Development Agency? It could be a CCO.
What about Waterfront Auckland? They already do exactly that kind of stuff, and they are handling large amounts of money while doing so. If I understand it right, they are even funding some of the superyacht shipyard projects themselves.
Yes like that, but Waterfront Auckland is restricted to the land the council owns or has influence over with Ports of Auckland. We need something that can act like that anywhere in the region.
on a vaguely related note; the Council’s energy and climate change mitigation strategy is open for comment until 18 July http://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/EN/planspoliciesprojects/plansstrategies/theaucklandplan/climatechangemitigationstrategy/Pages/home.aspx download a copy and speak your piece
On another vaguely related note – The Block: Taking 2200m2 of land less than 300m from Takapuna CBD, and re-building 4 exceptionally average single story detached houses. It’s possibly great television, but it’s a site that should be really screaming for development at a higher density, especially as the houses face out on to an exceptionally busy street (in which case retaining their existing street focus is silly). Drove past today, and it looks like one of them might have a bedroom in the gable.
I’ve heard that they are actually earmarked for demolition and redevelopment after filming, anyone confirm that?
That rumour certainly doesn’t fit with show ‘outline’ where they are all auctioned off at the end of the series. Though often the auctions in these shows do seem a bit staged. It does seem relatively implausible that you would buy 4 houses, deliberately mess them up, then renovate them, then destroy them all over again. Though when the land value is 85% of their RV, then such a large footprint probably is worth a bit. Still have to rig the auction though, and you’d think they could have found a site where the houses would be kept if that was the case.
I can’t “confirm” it, but I did hear from a reasonably well placed source that the expectation is that The Block houses will be purchased by developers and demolished. Not quite sure where Plan Change 37 is at in terms of approval, but the site the houses stand on is likely to shortly allow for 6 story residential development, so the value is very much in the land.
James,
I completely agree that the “Block” project is a disgrace. Yes, this is land on which a multi storey building should have been built. Other parts of Anzac Avenue give a pointer to what may have been possible. As you have mentioned, amongst other things, it makes the provision of efficient public transport that much more difficult because this is the catchment area for walking to that transport.
I struggle to see how it accords with the Council’s aim to intensify development in Takapuna.
I think The Block houses highlight my point about rebuilding on single vs multiple houses. If developers tried to build higher density houses on each of these sites individually the outcome would be rubbish. However if on developer bought all four, and same thing happened all the way down the street a much better quality outcome would result.
The only logical conclusion to be drawn from directive 10.6 is that minimum parking standards must go, but most planners/engineers under the age of 40 (and anyone who had read Donald Shoup’s parking masterpiece) knew that already
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