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By Patrick Reynolds, on May 21st, 2012 Councillor Brewer continues to play politics with the CRL as reported in this morning’s Herald; here. I guess this isn’t a surprise as he wants the mayor’s job and Brown’s mayoralty is identified with the CRL. Brewer has in the past made the now common National Party claims of ‘supporting’ public transport while going out of his way to attack any real steps towards meaningful change in this direction. Here is the wonderfully vague waffle on his website:
Promoting transport solutions
Gridlock traffic has long been the number one complaint about Auckland. With the roads only set to get busier, the Auckland Council will need to find sustainable transport solutions, while making sure our neighbourhoods are protected.
Cameron has worked effectively with the New Zealand Transport Authority, the Automobile Association, rail authorities, public transport providers and advocates. He is committed to leading the charge on addressing local transport issues.
This is after the article congratulating himself and other retrogrades like Ken Baguley for getting the bus lanes on Remuera Rd downgraded to uselessness.
But enough on political game playing; there really is nothing duller, the interesting point is not that Brewer is going to spend the next year painting the CRL as black as he can but rather that his current complaint exactly expresses the reverse of what I believe the Council ought to be doing with the CRL. Here is his big idea:
Orakei councillor Cameron Brewer yesterday said it was crazy to spend $112 million in the coming financial year on land purchases for the rail loop when it had no funding certainty.
Well of course buying property is a really exchanging one asset for another, so not really ‘crazy’ unless a particularly poor deal is made. And here’s the thing, transit stations transform land use and value positively, so the Council is in a strong position to make good deals through the purchases around the CRL. Two of the financially most successful transit systems in world, in Hong Kong and Tokyo achieve this success through the very act of investing in and developing property around subway stations. A recent article at Atlantic Cities on the Tokyo system begins with this observation:
Twice during my recent trip to Tokyo, once at Shibuya and again in a suburb to the west of the city, I exited a subway platform only to find myself swaddled in a massive department store. This was the Tokyu store.
Really innovative councillors, especially from the supposedly business savvy right, should be pointing out the investment opportunities for the Council Property CCO especially around Aotea station and at the Downtown Centre that the CRL offers. The article continues:
…the Tokyu Corporation. Established in 1922 as a regional development company, Tokyu today is a massive “rail-based conglomerate” of nearly 400 companies that employs 30,000 people, only a tenth of which work directly for the railway. Beginning in the 1930s Tokyu surrounded its hubs with commercial and retail buildings and sold land near its intermediate stations to universities at good prices, to create reliable residential (and thus passenger) corridors.
My compliant with the Council is not that it shouldn’t buy property where it intends to change that property’s value through transport initiatives but rather that the Property CCO seems rather lacklustre and lacking in sufficient energy to maximise these opportunities. I guess it doesn’t get any such lead from the Council itself.
No surprise as we certainly don’t seem to be blessed with much quality from the C&R ticket. I am most disappointed with Councillor Fletcher, to whom all Aucklanders owe a debt of gratitude for the construction of Britomart, as she is reported as observing:
C&R leader Christine Fletcher said the time was not right for a big budget and a big spend-up.
Well Sydney built much of its metro in the Great Depression, and in many ways it is the perfect time, interest rates are low, especially for local authorities, the construction industry is largely idle, the city and country needs investment in game changing infrastructure, and property can be easily bought. And we are only talking about getting ready to start the real work later which gives a few years for things to change in Wellington.
Instead these local politicians seem to all be taking the lead from the visionaries currently in charge in Wellington; the big idea is to invest in nothing, construct nothing, change nothing, and hope that somehow through all this inaction that there’s a brighter day around the corner.
So my question to Mr Brewer, the man ‘committed to leading the charge on addressing local transport issues’ other than not investing in Auckland’s future, where is your charge heading? Gridlock I guess.
By Patrick Reynolds, on April 26th, 2012 Pronouncements on Auckland by Unitec’s Dushko Bogunovich’s are consistently curious to say the least, not many urban designers seem so anti urbanist. Generally they are best puzzled over then ignored, but his latest effort, dutifully reported by Anne Gibson in the Herald, deserves a brief response. The baffling outburst is here. Basically he is trying to claim that by repurposing an office block into apartments in Vincent St nothing is being gained. Because there won’t, he argues, be a net gain of humans in the inner city. Here is his math:
“Does he not realise that the conversion leaves the physical density the same as before and keeps roughly the same number of bodies in the CBD as before, only the bodies were there eight hours during day?
Where to start? Well there clearly will be an increase in residents in the inner city through this move, and they may or may not also all work in in the CBD, this can’t be known, although it is not a long stretch to assume that some or even most will, as it would be probably be a little odd to decide to live right in town but commute to, say, Takanini. Odd but not impossible, and just fine if that’s what occurs. This is of no consequence. What really matters is that a whole block of commercial space will be withdrawn from that market and because of this will help to encourage demand for new construction elsewhere in town. And at the same time a bunch of new grocery-buying, theatre-going, who-knows-what doing people will be moving in. Now as we are told in the original article that BECA, the current tenants of this block, are moving up the road to the old ARC building and not out to the suburbs, we can safely conclude that this will indeed increase net amount of ‘bodies’ in the city.
Beca staff will soon leave the block which is still their international headquarters even though only a handful of staff remain, after divisions gradually shifted to the former Auckland Regional Council headquarters on Pitt St.
So the complete reverse of Bogunovich’s next claim:
“Now they will be there eight hours at night. And that this is yet another sign significant businesses are decentralising rather than compacting in the city?”
This development is clearly putting a small squeeze on the availability of commercial space in the CBD, removing an older lower value block from the market and giving it a new use. Bringing construction and new residents into town which will support new and existing businesses there. Put it this way: If every current office block in the CBD was converted to apartments then demand for new office space would clearly grow, stimulating construction as well as increasing the economic life of the CBD as the needs and desires of these new residents are met.
So of course this is an encouraging move and exactly the kind of thing the Council wants to see. Churn in existing buildings is a sign of economic activity and dynamism in a market. And this sort of repurposing is exactly what we’ed expect to see as a start of vitality returning to the CBD residential market. Is this what so angers the anti-intensivist Bogunovich? Roger Blakeley in the earlier Anne Gibson article here:
“This is music to our ears as we look to quality residential development in the city centre and other centres as part of the quality compact city in the Auckland Plan.”
Quite. But also this but also from the developer:
“Three Malaysian and Singaporean investors have bought apartments.
“They are very impressed with the growth in Auckland City amenities, for example the Auckland Art Gallery, Wynyard Quarter, Britomart and the strategic plan for Auckland City.”
Vincent St is a great location for apartments, so handy to all those amenities. They could also have mentioned just how close these new apartments will be to not only the new Aotea station but especially to the K’rd one on the City Rail Link…. especially useful for when these new city residents wish to visit the rest of the isthmus, including Takanini.
 Vincent St and Greys Ave Public housing on Greys Ave and other residential on the Myers Park side. The sheds at the lower end currently used for that most valuable of resources; parking, are surely due development. The building in question ‘A’. Just out of shot on the left is the building that BECA are moving to; bit of a stretch to call this decentralisation. Both streets ennobled by London Planes, arguably the greatest of street trees. It would be lovely to see the gaps on these streets planted.
By Peter M, on April 24th, 2012 Those promoting a transport and urban outcome based around smart growth, a compact city, a more balanced transport policy and more investment in public transport, walking and cycling – instead of on road capacity – have long based their arguments on the need for change. This had some logic to it as the general trend the world was heading seemed to be towards more urban sprawl and more car dependency – which has some serious negative consequences for the economy, society and the environment. The paradigm could be summarised as follows:
The market is delivering more sprawl and more car dependency, which is collectively a bad thing, so we must intervene in the market for the common good
Pretty much everything is couched on this world-view: from both sides of the argument actually. On the side of smart growth and a balanced transport policy we still hear much about the need to “change behaviour”, the need to “curb urban sprawl”, the need to “get people out of their cars” and so on. On the ‘other side’ of the argument, we hear a lot of criticism about planners engaging in “social engineering”, about public transport advocates wanting to “force people” out of their cars. Essentially both sides of the debate are making the same assumption: that the market (being the aggregated wants and needs of the population) wants to deliver car-based urban sprawl. They only differ in whether this outcome should be allowed or discouraged.
One of the key things that various posts on this site over the past month or two have tried to emphasise is that this paradigm has changed. Increasingly, the evidence is pointing towards the market making a pretty radical departure from its general trends of most of the last century, with a new and thoroughly different paradigm emerging – the market actually wants less sprawl and less car dependency. People actually want to catch public transport because it makes sense for them. People want to live in central parts of the city, not on the urban periphery. People are smart enough to realise that what Auckland needs is not a whole pile more roads, but a world-class public transport system to complement our existing roading network. In short, those promoting this new paradigm no longer need to couch their arguments in terms of the need for change or the need for intervention, increasingly they can simply focus on allowing and enabling this shift to happen.
There are two key pieces of evidence in relation to this paradigm shift: traffic volumes compared to public transport patronage growth being the first and the location of housing demand (highlighted most clearly through house prices) being the other. Let’s start with traffic volumes compared to PT patronage.
Stu’s two posts a few weeks back really highlighted that the current ‘flat-lining’ of traffic growth is not only a pretty dramatic shift from constant increases over much of the last century, but also that this flat-lining has been going on now for quite a long time: seven whole years. Furthermore, a ‘de-coupling’ of traffic growth and economic growth has been going on for around 14 years now, meaning that for the first time we’re able to grow the economy without a similar level of growth in traffic volumes. And in more recent years we’ve been growing the population quite significantly but once again without a commensurate increase in traffic volumes:
The idea that traffic volumes won’t continue to increase, or at least that they might increase at a slower rate than population growth (as each person travels less) is a complete anathema to the “old paradigm”. Under that old paradigm volumes always increase by around 3-4% a year and always would. With most roading projects justified by forecasts of increasing traffic in the future (and the horrors if a road is not widened or added to cope with that increase), the huge dip in per capita travel over the past five years is utterly devastating to the business case for pretty much every new roading project. If our system for assessing such projects actually recognised this fundamental shift, which it doesn’t.
In contrast, public transport patronage in Auckland most particularly has grown in leaps and bounds over this same period – up by around a third since 2006: Comparing the trends of traffic growth and PT patronage growth, the way to structure arguments for a shift in funding becomes clear: it’s not about what modes we should spend the money on for broader reasons (although those arguments are still valid), but a much simpler “people are using PT a lot more, people are driving less, we need to reflect that in our funding balance”. By the way, the current government funding plan spends about $27 on state highways for every dollar spent on PT infrastructure – about as ignorant of these trends as practically possible.
The second paradigm shift relates to that vexed issue of “how should Auckland grow?” The common assumption is that “the market” wants to grow through urban expansion or sprawl, and that planning intervention is required to encourage/force people to live more intensively and ‘save’ the rural hinterland. Yet again, both sides of the debate accept the paradigm that everyone wants to live on the urban edge, in a “quarter acre paradise”. However, a series of posts – this time mainly by Patrick – have highlighted that the reality these days is actually quite different.
Patrick has noted a series of articles in the NZ Herald and other overseas publications over the past few months which consistently say the same thing: house prices in the inner suburbs are soaring while (especially in the USA) they are still falling on the urban periphery. There are a wide variety of reasons given for this phenomenon, things like higher fuel prices, changing demographics, smaller household sizes, cultural shifts and so forth – all of which are interestingly similar to many of the causes that might be behind the stagnation in traffic volumes over the past seven years.
So the paradigm of “allowing sprawl or forcing/encouraging intensification” really may not be valid anymore, just like the “providing for vehicle growth or encouraging/forcing people onto public transport” is now outdated. People are changing their habits already. The trick now is to ensure that policy decisions, especially when it comes to decisions over where transport money is spent, reflect this new reality. We plan for the future, both in land-use decisions (whether to expand urban boundaries or make intensification easier) and in transport decisions (whether to spend money on holiday highways or city rail links) – let’s ensure that our decisions reflect the new reality of what people actually are doing and what people want. Not an outdated, old paradigm, version of that.
We don’t have to force change anymore, let’s allow it to happen.
By Patrick Reynolds, on April 16th, 2012 An Anne Gibson penned front pager with a screaming headline in Friday’s Herald declared: Auckland House Values Soar
Of course this is based on average figures lumping together all suburbs and all price brackets. But really the data is very patchy, and only Auckland, in fact only parts of Auckland, have values returned to pre-2008 levels. I guess the editors’ desire for a catchy headline doesn’t bother with such detail. The article goes on to focus in on the best performing sector with this report from an auction house:
Last-night, the buoyant inner-city Auckland housing market continued its run of high prices…
and then Gibson quotes a QV valuer:
“Quality properties in good school zones and near the city centre remain in high demand,” said Ms Whitehead “However, there are insufficient properties coming onto the market to meet this demand,”
“In central areas, where zoning will allow, we are starting to to see infill housing sites being created, with seemingly good demand for these for these vacant sections either from spec builders or potential owner/occupiers.” she said.
My emphasis. There are two points I want to raise here represented by each one:
1. It is clear that if there is a boom it is not city wide but quite focused on the closer in suburbs. And none of the usual commentators seem to be asking why.
2. As a result and if this continues the Council can win its argument about how the city should grow by simply getting its own house in order, with regulations and zoning rules to facilitate brownfields development, and let the market do the rest.
First let’s look a little closer at the ‘boom’.
On March 5th the Herald helpfully published a round up of dwelling sales data for the whole region and beyond. What is particularly useful about this doc is that it not only separates suburbs out but also allows a longer view: giving a percentage change from Nov 2007 as well as short periods. There is some commentary as well with interviews with economists, agents, and valuers.
The more interesting numbers are the longer term ‘change from Nov 2007′ because it enables looking past short term noise, but also it shows if values have recovered back to their pre-crash level or not.
Back in Feb Bernard Hickey from interest.co.nz noted that the biggest rises have been at the top end and are largely the result of the main recipients of Key’s tax cuts bidding up each other’s flash houses: 
But the growth hasn’t been consistent across the top end, the North Shore in particular is missing from the figures. Although it hasn’t done as poorly as the true ex-urbia of Rodney and Papakura/Franklin or as the lower value areas as Manukau and Waitakere. Let alone the provincial towns like Hamilton, Whangarei, Tauranga- all still seriously down from 2007, despite the diary boom. But some Shore suburbs are still below the Nov 2007 figure, like Campbells Bay at -3.6%, Castor Bay -2.8%, and even the fabulous cliff top sites of Takapuna -2.4%. So there is no region or city wide boom.
Here is a list of suburbs with above or near double digit percentage growth since Nov 2007 [+9% or more]:
Epsom, Grey Lynn, Kingsland, Meadowbank, Mt Eden, Onehunga, Ponsonby, Pt Chev, Sandringham, Western Springs, Westmere.
All in the old Auckland City Council area. There are only two outliers; somewhere in Manukau called Burswood with +10.9%, and nearly in with +8.5%; Hillcrest on the North Shore. Otherwise nowhere in the rest of Auckland nor the regions are much above the 2007 price and most in fact are still way down. Pretty consistent numbers. So what’s going on?
Is Ms Whitehead’s thought about school zones right then? Economist Shamubeel Eaquab also mentions this in his interview: ‘In good school zones and other desirable postcodes, professionals…are still buying houses and paying spectacular prices.’ Well if it was all about school zones then you’d expect Kohi, Mission Bay, Orakei, Parnell, Remuera, St Heliers, and St John to be in there too wouldn’t you? No flash schools in any of the big movers above except Epsom and Mt Eden [only 2/11].
Isn’t a better explanation that the areas with the strong growth are the previously more affordable inner city areas being bid up by people for whom living closer to the centre is increasingly important? Ms Whitehead’s ‘near the city centre’ looks sharper to me as a unifying theme here than the old school zone story. It looks like urban is hip among property buyers, but why? Is it just the qualities of those inner suburbs on the old tram routes of Auckland? I think that’s part of it; they’re all leafier, more walkable, and more mixed in with other amenities like shops, cafes, and employment, than the newer more auto-dependent further out suburbs. [Here for an analysis of the difference]. But also perhaps the ever growing costs of car commuting and the poor transit options further out are also influencing this preference?
 Old 'tram built' suburbs of Auckland, from Mt Eden One odd thing about the Herald Property Report is that the CBD doesn’t seem to exist at all. Perhaps in the Herald’s view nobody lives there, or perhaps apartments are just too déclassé to be included; the Herald only sees ‘houses’ and not all kinds of dwellings? So there are no numbers for the inner city proper. But they do quote Simon Damerell of Ray Whites who says: “A good villa or bungalow or well constructed apartment in a good location will sell well”. And it seems that close to the centre is clearly an important condition, now, of a ‘good location’.
I’m calling this growing price spread between inner and outer living an indication of a big ‘Flight to the Centre’. The reversal of the 1960s and 70s ‘Flight to the Suburbs’. Even more boldly I’m calling that this is structural, a discontinuity from the last period, and important. Here is an earlier description of this as visible in Auckland. Why? Because it isn’t just in Auckland but is observable all over the world. It is looking like a real zeitgeist issue, like the decline in driving. Richard Florida of Atlantic Cities is good on this:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2012/04/end-sprawl/1692/
Nathan Norris at Planetizen see a generational shift at work see here:
http://placeshakers.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/generation-ys-great-migration/
If this is correct the pro-sprawl agenda of ACT’s Productivity Commission is likely to end in tears. Remember Ms Whitehead saw a supply problem in a very specific market sector; the inner city. There is absolutely no chance that paving new bits of the countryside halfway to Whangarei will alter this supply, no matter how swish NZTA’s new motorways are, if few people want to live there. It seems that the agenda of this state funded lobby group is particularly backward looking, perhaps blind to the direction of the data by the groups whose interests they are serving. Or perhaps it’s that line of Steve Jobs that things ‘Have to be believed to be seen’. They, like the government, are no believers in change.
A very restrained commentary on the Prod Com’s report can be found here at architecturenow.co.nz.
The direction of the market will make sprawl developments even more dependent on state and city subsidy than usual and the salespeople will likely find themselves swimming against the tide. And of course, every auto-dependant new little nest of cul-de-sacs out on the fringes will make Aucklands Motorways clog up further. Which makes the Herald’s latest view on this issue even more confused; here in yesterday’s editorial. As a criticism of the Council’s aims what does this mean for example?:
Its overarching aim is to create “the world’s most liveable city”, an idea that commuters stuck in traffic might find bleakly amusing, particularly if they have visited Vienna, Vancouver or Copenhagen.
Huh? So trying to make Auckland less auto dependent, to give Aucklanders real effective options to driving and helping them to not have to live in spread out in uninteresting and poorly performing distant suburbs is somehow the cause of congestion? The really disappointing thing about the argument here is not so much that it is wrong but rather that it insists on generalising one perspective and claiming that it is universal or at least in such ascendance that other ideas about the city must be crushed. It is a fearful view from the suburbs and worse, wants some kind of dictatorship based on this view all in the name of good taste.
And any sober person who ventures into the Queen St valley after 10pm is either brave or foolhardy; stepping around puddles of body fluids and avoiding assault has become standard practice. If this is a vision of the high-density future, most Aucklanders would say you can keep it.
This editorial with its mushy thinking, superficial apprehension of the issues and lazy appeal to unsupported claims [Kiwis all dream of the suburbs, apparently] has the clumsy big paw prints of John Roughan all over it. Regardless of its author and that it contradicts, without evidence, the information from their own paper above, it should still act as a wake-up call for the Council. It does point out how badly things were done under the previous council:
Residential development in Auckland is already intense: cross-lease sections have proliferated, as have apartment buildings in the CBD and inner suburbs. A profusion of shoddy apartments – including, but not limited to, those in the leaky-building fiasco – has hammered public confidence in intensive residential development.
With the flow of the market on the side of their plans for growth within existing city boundaries the Council should be concentrating on making sure all the things within its control are facilitating the outcomes it wants to see. Changing regulations that inhibit brownfields development, like minimum parking regulations, building setbacks, zoning and height restrictions in those areas where it is appropriate. In particular identifying special development zones especially on transport corridors. And getting effective systems in place to encourage not just good urban design but also good architectural outcomes is also important. Look here for a model from Melbourne. And here for another Australian study that offers a counter analysis to ACT’s view. Because in direct contrast to the sprawl boosting Productivity Commission economist Dr Rodney Dickens has this to say in the Herald document:
“Our research shows there is no shortage of sections to build on in our national and regional markets.”
But clearly there is a supply squeeze where people really prefer to be: close to the centre. Time for the Council to out-smart its opponents by helping the market build that livable city for us all.
And there is even a glimmer of hope in part of the end of yesterday’s confused editorial. A complaint it needs to take to Wellington, to those very men who fixed it so the ACT party could live again on generous Taxpayer stipends as the Productivity Commission, who would not support this exhortation:
It’s fine for the council to have a vision, but it needs to accord with that of the people who live here. It should devote itself to making public transport work - as it works in Hulse’s “modern cities” – rather than trying to make Auckland into a dense urban jungle.
My emphasis. Clearly this author has no idea of either who controls the money in transport in NZ or the relationship between land use and movement systems, but still, he or she get’s it half right in the last sentence. Because it seems pretty clear that people are much more frightened of finding themselves lost in a suburban wasteland than they are of that cliché from the previous era: the urban jungle.
By Patrick Reynolds, on April 11th, 2012 Tuesday’s Herald had a lot of good coverage of transport issues. No fewer than four good reports by Mathew Dearnaley. Rudman on the Remuera buslane rebellion, covered here on this site. And even a piece on the transformation of LA back towards being a transit town.
There was also really good coverage of this site’s founder, Josh Arbury, in his new role as Transport Strategist at the Council on value for money in Auckland’s PT; here. A piece on design of the new trains, here. And coverage of ways to raise infrastructure investment funds via proposed road pricing here. This issue deserves its own post and will get future coverage on this site. All this follows earlier an report on fewer road deaths here, and a really encouraging report on Shared Spaces with not only Alex Swney of Heart Of The City saying really good things about the improvements they bring but even the AA’s Simon Lambourne managing to not see the world ending at the removal of parking spaces; here, although still demanding more parking buildings.
But the one I want to look at in detail is about a seemingly insignificant little road with a boring name; who was/is Ian Mckinnon? Dearnaley’s article is here.
I have always hated this road. I hate driving on it. I certainly hate cycling on it. I hate the detail of its design. I hate its programme of speeding vehicles up briefly in the middle of the city. I hate the way it turns its back on its surrounding sites. I hate the way it cuts off Eden Terrace. I hate the way it spreads the quality of a motorway a little further into the surrounding area. And now it turns out to be so bad that it kills its users too….. In short the whole thing is a disaster. Why? Well first let’s look at its reported problems.
Although the road was built almost to motorway standard for the 30,000 vehicles that use it daily, and includes long downhill sections in both directions, it lacks a median barrier and has become notorious for crashes on its main bend.
So the idea of building a road ‘almost to motorway standard’ to link ordinary streets in the middle of the city has led to bad outcomes. Surprise me. And despite a road design that encourages speed it is now expected that declaring a lower speed limit will fix the situation, although police concede that this is unlikely.
But although the police intend monitoring the new limit, they are expected to “exercise discretion” until drivers get used to it, with prompting from electronic message signs over the next two weeks.
Hopeless really, it should have the physical characteristics of a city road; in particular it would be best to reduce it to one lane each way to help slow drivers. This would also provide the opportunity to add a real cycle lane here on the resultant spare tarmac. Something urgently needed because the NorthWestern cycleway stops at the Newton Road overbridge and this annoying little road could provide a way to link the cycleway up to K and Queen, to Symonds Street and therefore the Universities and the hospital, through to the Domain and so forth. A low cost way to get a great deal of cycling connection and some traffic calming thrown in for free! Like this:
 Ian McKinnon Drive as a way to extend the NW cycleway to Upper Queen St and beyond Now let’s go back a bit further and look at what else is so bad about this road. Here’s a wider view from above:
 Dom Rd/New North Rd flyovers bottom. Ian McKinnon Dr top. Ian McKinnon Drive is a relatively new road [anyone got a date?] inserted through a much older street pattern and a sorry consequence of the terribly over-engineered and land gobbling monument to post-war planning that is the Dominion Road/New North rd interchange. Originally designed to be part of the Dominion Rd Motorway, yes!, this interchange clearly needed somewhere to head to once the motorway was thankfully abandoned, so Ian Makinnon was rammed through. Here is how it was:
 Dominion Rd + New North Rd with rail line pre interchange Ok you can see the problem; both Dominion Rd and New North Rd converging into one road city bound. You can also see what’s good about this intricate and interwoven neighbourhood street pattern; housing and employment mixed together, walkable and interconected streets; a modern urbanist’s dream. But to allow [or force] a car based transport model on a city like this can only mean getting out the wreckers ball. It also means, of course, choosing to prioritise those living further out and wanting/needing to drive in over the value of the land and buildings and the community already existing in this inner area. New outer suburbs over older inner ones. Spirit of the times. Here is work by Kent Lundberg showing what value was directly destroyed by putting this road in [Twitter: @kentslundberg]:
Interesting to see just how much of old inner Auckland has been lost to expanding the roadspace to accommodate our imbalanced car focussed system, especially in the light of how valuable this kind of inner city property has become. What great rating income if nothing else has been abandoned by choosing this kind of city. Lost wealth. But that isn’t all, this demolishing and severance, as well as the presence of more and more vehicles rushing past has kept the remaining odd parcels of property low value, underdeveloped, and underperforming. Auto-dependency waving yet again its magic wand of anti-agglomeration. In the top left you can see a stretch of Newton Gully which has also, of course, been sacrificed to auto infrastructure. Making complete the separation of the remaining housing of Eden Terrace into a strangely stranded island. And one that few walk to and from as Ian McKinnon and motorway form such barriers to pedestrians.
You can also see there is a rail line running through these pictures. Had the earlier versions of the City Rail Link been built and a real Auckland passenger service been invested in so many of the commuters that these interventions were designed for could have still got to the CBD efficiently. Then could the costly destruction of so much of this neighbourhood have been avoided? It would have had to have been considered valuable for that to happen or at least there would have had to have been the ability for local view to have been heard and considered instead of distant decisions being forced down from City Hall and Wellington. We could still do much to improve this area, undo a lot of the damage, but we’ll never get the old street pattern back. The good news is that reducing the road space will become more and more viable as we build effective alternatives car commuting and as it would release a fair of land for productive use such rehab work might pay for itself. Here is an earlier post about this by Josh Arbury.
Let’s also remember the wider lesson from this story, we must balance place value and movement benefit more sensibly than was done here. Motorways and other invasive insertions are always more likely to happen in areas of low value but are those values permanent? How much have we already lost? Grafton Gully, for example, is a terrible loss to the city and clumsy separation of the city and the Domain, and put through in an age when we valued wild places a little less. Is it any surprise that the road lobby are now proposing to complete the total separation of Onehunga from its harbour by motorway; a lot easier to get its payday among the poorer and less connected of South Auckland after getting a bloody nose in the eastern suburbs.
So we can see in this one example how the auto-dependent model is considered the least productive and most wasteful system of movement for a city; it is a costly destroyer of place value. But we’ve always known that:
 De Leuw Cather report 1965, detail
By Peter M, on April 9th, 2012 A couple of excellent posts by Stu Donovan over the last couple of weeks have highlighted a fundamental change in transportation trends across not just New Zealand, but many developed world countries: we’re not driving more - in fact, on a per capita basis, we’re driving a lot less. After a century of almost uninterrupted increases in the use of private vehicles, this is a pretty enormous change – something far too challenging for the small minds at the Ministry of Transport or NZTA, for example.
But this is not the only fundamental change that’s occurring. Just as we have always assumed traffic volumes will increase, we have also always assumed that the land-use development market wants to sprawl. Limiting urban sprawl has been seen as an important planning ideal for a long time (for a variety of reasons), but it has always been pitched as a battle between planners (who want to contain it) and ‘the market’ (which supposedly wants to sprawl). This simplistic situation dominates discussion in Auckland, for example, about how the city should grow. Allowing most development to occur through intensification is seen as “unrealistic”, “contrary to market forces” or even “authoritarian” – based on the assumption that it’s working against a natural desire of people to want large sections on the edge of the city.
Until relatively recently, this simplistic approach may well have been true. If you look at the USA, population change in 2006 showed a huge amount of growth (shown in red) taking place in suburban and rural areas (map from here): 
However, if we look at 2011 the pattern is quite different: So generally a lot less growth in the larger rural/suburban counties that show up clearest in the map above. But the US population is still growing, suggesting that a lot more of the growth must be concentrated in urban centres that don’t show up as obviously in the map (because they’re geographically much smaller). The USA Today article that put together these maps discusses this:
Almost three years after the official end of a recession that kept people from moving and devastated new suburban subdivisions, people continue to avoid counties on the farthest edge of metropolitan areas, according to Census estimates out today.
The financial and foreclosure crisis forced more people to rent. Soaring gas prices made long commutes less appealing. And high unemployment drew more people to big job centers. As the nation crawls out of the downturn, cities and older suburbs are leading the way.
Population growth in fringe counties nearly screeched to a halt in the year that ended July 1, 2011. By comparison, counties at the core of metro areas are growing faster than the nation as a whole.
A bit of analysis of where growth is actually happening:
All but two of the 39 counties with 1 million-plus people — Michigan’s Wayne (Detroit) and Ohio’s Cuyahoga (Cleveland) — grew from 2010 to 2011.
Twenty-eight of the big counties gained faster than the nation, which grew at the slowest rate since the Great Depression (0.73%). The counties’ median growth rate was 1.3% (half grew faster, half slower).
Those 28 — including California’s Alameda and Contra Costa counties, Florida’s Broward and Hillsborough, Texas’ Harris and Dallas — generated more than a third of the USA’s growth. Before the recession and housing bust, when people flocked to new development on farmland, they contributed just 27%…
…Central metro counties accounted for 94% of U.S. growth, compared with 85% just before the recession.
And some further discussion:
“This could be the end of the exurb as a place where people aspire to go when they’re starting their families,” says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. “So many people have been burned by this. … First-time home buyers, immigrants and minorities took a real big hit.”
During the ’70s gas shortage and the ’80s savings and loan industry crisis, some predicted the end of suburban sprawl. It didn’t happen then, but current trends could change the nation’s growth patterns permanently.
Aging Baby Boomers, who have begun to retire, and Millennials, who are mostly in their teens and 20s, are more inclined to live in urban areas, McIlwain says.
“I’m not sure we’re going to see outward sprawl even if the urge to sprawl continues,” he says. “Counties are getting to the point that they don’t have the money to maintain the roads, water, sewer. … This is a century of urbanization.”
Demographic change really is the ‘elephant in the room’ when it comes to predicting future trends. While it’s early days for us to make completely confident pronouncements over the future of urban sprawl, just as changing trends relating to traffic volumes require us to fundamentally rethink much of what we’ve previously taken as gospel, changing demand patterns for urban development need to be given serious consideration. Perhaps the real urban development debate is not so much about the market wanting sprawl and planners trying to fight the market; but rather more about the market wanting different housing types in inner urban areas and our planning system being unable to cope with how to provide these in an attractive yet affordable manner.
By Peter M, on April 7th, 2012 With the Auckland spatial plan finalised, the next few years will be a really challenging process of figuring out how to implement the plan – particularly in relation to how we achieve the level of intensification envisaged by the plan. I noted in this previous post how it will be challenging for Auckland to build its way to housing affordability, but that’s only a part of the challenge. Perhaps the biggest challenge will be to gain public acceptance for more intensive forms of housing than Auckland has generally seen in the past – so that it’s possible to achieve the level of intensification required by the Auckland Plan.
A relatively recent post by Matt highlighted that high-rise and high-density are not necessarily the same thing, with the key point being that we don’t need to build more stupid Herne Bay towers to achieve the level of intensification the Auckland spatial plan requires. In fact, the Herne Bay towers are even that dense, because they’re enormous dwellings and because (at least with one of them) there’s a massive amount of land at its base which is used for parking, a tennis court and so on. So not only do buildings like those towers scare people shitless over the prospect of intensification – they actually don’t even provide much intensification themselves. It’s like an enormous ‘lose lose’.
Auckland is, of course, not the only city in the world facing this vexed issue of how to intensify in a way that’s acceptable to existing residents. Vancouver, San Francisco, Melbourne, Sydney and many many other cities face dire housing shortages and/or housing affordability crises – leading to a pressing need to build more housing. Yet at the same time, rising petrol prices, changing demographics and environmental concerns are making many cities, including Auckland of course, look at finding the best ways to intensify.
A useful blog post from Better Cities and Towns highlights this issue – with some useful proposed solutions. Let’s start with the pressing concern, which sounds very similar to the Auckland situation:
The mismatch between current US housing stock and shifting demographics, combined with the growing demand for walkable urban living, has been poignantly defined by recent research and publications by the likes of Christopher Nelson and Chris Leinberger and most recently by the Urban Land Institute’s publication, What’s Next: Real Estate in the New Economy. Now it is time to stop talking about the problem and start generating immediate solutions! Are you ready to be part of the solution?
Unfortunately, the solution is not as simple as adding more multi-family housing stock using the dated models/types of housing that we have been building. Rather, we need a complete paradigm shift in the way that we design, locate, regulate, and develop homes. As What’s Next states, “it’s a time to rethink and evolve, reinvent and renew.”
The post highlights a key collection of housing typologies that can help achieve this shift, but in a way that’s more likely to be acceptable to residents than the ‘high-rise hell’ envisaged by hysterical journalists writing for the NZ Herald. These are known as ”Missing Middle Density” housing. Examples are given in the diagram below: With some exceptions (generally terraced housing) Auckland hasn’t seen much of these “missing middle housing types” built in the past 20-30 years. At least since the death of the “sausage flat” when density controls were more strictly enforced from (I think) the 1980s onwards. Yet these middle density housing solutions could work really well in Auckland – particularly in areas where large-scale redevelopment is likely (such as around Tamaki/Glen Innes).
The post goes on to identify a number of key characteristics of this ‘middle housing’, including the following:
- A walkable context
- Medium density but lower perceived densities
- Small footprint and blended densities
- Smaller, well-designed units
- Off-street parking does not drive the site plan
- Simple construction
- Creating community
- Marketability
The article actually has some really useful advice (it’s written by a principal of an architecture and urban design firm - Opticos Design) for avoiding common mistakes when building this kind of housing. Some handy examples are also provided: 
If I was a developer this is the kind of typology I’d be looking at really closely. While screaming at the council to sort out their damn planning rules so they can actually achieve the level of intensification wanted by the more high-level strategic documents.
By Peter M, on March 27th, 2012 Seems like the best way to become a regular blogger on this site is to continually bombard the authors with Guest Posts – I’m excited about joining the team!
One of the fundamental geometric advantages of public transport is that it uses less space to shift a certain number of people, than your typical car does. This is most often talked about in terms of corridor space, with such metrics as “this railway line carries the equivalent of ten lanes of traffic” being commonly discussed. This is very true of course, but misses another element of the comparison – which is storage space. While rail and bus depots look fairly large, on a per person carried basis, they are a fraction of the space that gets dedicated to car storage – more commonly known as parking.
While these matters are generally quite logical, being able to quantify the space impact of different transport options is pretty useful when we’re looking at how to integrate our land-use aspirations with the transport projects we prioritise. A useful article by Todd Littman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute helps by doing some of this work.
Newman and Kenworthy (1999, Table 3.9) found that automobile dependent cities average about 7 meters of road length per capita, while less automobile-dependent cities average about 2.5 meters, and parking supply follows a similar pattern. This indicates that automobile-oriented transportation increases facility land requirements 3 to 5 times. Put differently, 66% to 80% of the land devoted to roads and parking facilities in modern cities results from the greater space requirements of automobile transport.
In addition, motor vehicle traffic tends to reduce development density indirectly by increasing the need for sidewalk and building setbacks to avoid traffic noise and dust, so larger boulevards, highways shoulders and front lawns can be considered, in part, a land use cost of motor vehicle transport.
The key point here is to think about land as the obvious scarce resource it is – especially in our cities. If land is being used for wider and wider roads and larger and larger parking lots, that is land which cannot be used for buildings, parks and other – arguably more productive and desirable – uses. Littman goes on to detail this on a per capita basis:
An urban arterial traffic lane can typically accommodate about 1,000 peak-period vehicles. If the average urban automobile commuter drives 10 kilometers each way on a 3-meter wide lane, each requires 60 square meters of additional road space (3m width x 10,000m length x 2 daily commutes ÷ 1,000), plus two to four parking spaces (one at home, one at work, and a share at other destinations) that average 10 square meters for curb parking or 20 square meters for off-street parking. Each additional urban motorist therefore requires 80 to 140 square meters of land for additional road and parking space to avoid increasing traffic and parking congestion.
Compare this with other urban land uses. A typical urban resident uses about 100 square meters of land for a small-lot (400 sq. m.) single-family home with four residents, and less for multi-family housing (townhouses, condominiums and apartments). A typical employee needs about 10 square meters of office space or about 30 square meters for retail. This indicates that an automobile requires more land than a typical urban resident uses for housing, jobs and commercial activities. Automobiles more than double the amount of land required per capita.
That final sentence is critical, that automobiles double the amount of space required on a per capita basis. In other words, providing for cars halves the amount of space available for more productive activities.
What becomes particularly relevant is how this varies across different land uses – which is illustrated in the graph below:
You can really see this domination of commercial areas by roads and parking when you look at recently developed employment centres in suburban USA – with Tysons Corner near Washington DC probably being the most classic example: The ironic thing about having so much land dedicated to roads and parking in commercial centres like this is that this is most probably extremely valuable land. Obviously the zoning is fairly permissive for higher-intensity developments, obviously there’s already a number of businesses located here (the 12th largest employment centre in the USA), and it has good access to both downtown Washington DC and Dulles Airport. Yet so much of this precious land has been eaten up by roads and parking – because the auto-oriented model the places was developed around is just so extremely inefficient when it comes to utilising space.
(By the way, there are some pretty grand plans to completely change Tysons Corner over the next few decades, once the Silver Line Metro System is threaded through it).
What Littman’s work, as well as observations of areas like Tysons Corner, tells us is that if we want to be successful at utilising our urban space more efficiently, then we really need to think very hard about the contribution of transport to this goal, or how transport can undermine this goal if we continue to rely on a primary method of transportation that’s so extremely space inefficient. Furthermore, from an economic perspective if we are to utilise this huge amount of available land that’s often located in logical areas for growth and development, then we need to be providing an attractive alternative to the auto-centric planning paradigm we often get so stuck in. Quite simply, you can’t turn a Manukau or a Botany or a Westgate into the next Newmarket unless a massively lower proportion of people drive – there simply isn’t the space.
By Matt L, on March 12th, 2012 As these two recent posts discussed, the Auckland Spatial Plan has been going through a fairly major overhaul during the past few weeks – in response to submissions on the draft plan and also in response to further analysis that has taken place since the draft plan was released for consultation back in September last year. Perhaps the most critical part of the Plan is what’s known as the “Development Strategy” – this key map in the draft plan: There has been a lot of debate and discussion over the key question of how much of Auckland’s future growth should be inside the urban limits compared to outside, as well as discussion over which are the most appropriate (and realistic) parts of the existing urban area to focus further intensification within. The net result of that discussion, unfortunately, seems to be a shift from 75 per cent down to 60-70 per cent of growth being inside the current urban limits (not the current urban area, a key distinction as there’s space for around 30,000 more greenfield dwellings within the current urban limits in places like Flat Bush and Hobsonville). But there has also been quite a significant change in the proposed locations for urban intensification – which previously were predominantly the red areas in the map above.
The new development strategy map has been flashed up on screen many times at council meetings over the past month – so is visible in many of the videos located at the excellent Franklin Live website, which documents the council’s business (although I wish they’d put their videos on Youtube for better searching and archiving capabilities). However, it was not until last week’s Transport Committee meeting that a more easily accessible version of the updated development strategy map has been posted online – with the map visible on page 5 of this document. Here it is: Comparing the two is easiest if we put them side by side: The first obvious difference is that the greenfield investigation areas (the boxes with dotted red lines around them) are much bigger in the updated strategy. The boxes in the northwest and the north are, in particular, significantly more sizeable than in the draft strategy (which surely makes a NW busway even more important). There’s also a new box just south of Beachlands/Maraetai that didn’t appear in the draft strategy.
The next obvious change relates to the Metropolitan Centres – with Henderson and Botany upgraded from being ‘merely’ town centres in the draft plan to being full Metropolitan Centres in the updated version. This seems fairly sensible, especially with Henderson well served by existing services and infrastructure and with a huge amount of money going into building a busway from Botany to Panmure over the next decade. Specifically identifying local centres has dropped off the map, with the only other change I can spot (in relation to centres) being a removal of either Kingsland or Morningside from the list of town centres.
Aside from the above, the clear biggest change is what might be thought of as a “centralisation of intensification”. Aside from the Tamaki/Glen Innes area and a corridor along SH20, there weren’t really any “development areas” identified on the isthmus – which seemed strange as it’s the inner parts of Auckland where demand for apartments, terraced houses and other more intensified building typologies appears strongest. The new strategy seems to recognise this, with most parts of the isthmus not specifically identified as having heritage value being identified as suitable for “moderate change”. The extent of ‘moderate change’ on the North Shore has expanded quite significantly too – reflecting the likely market attractiveness of this part of Auckland. Once again, this seems to be a sensible move.
All things considered, aside from the wildly larger areas identified for urban sprawl, most of the proposed changes to the development strategy seem sensible. It’s particularly helpful that there now seems to be greater alignment between areas identified for moderate change and the likelihood of such change actually happening because there’s market demand. How successful the development strategy is will depend a lot on the timing of releasing various amounts of additional development capacity. If zoning regulations are changed in areas identified for change before we open up huge tracts of farmland for development, we might actually see more intensification than expected – particularly if the Council can do some “best practice” examples to show the market that it is possible. But if changing the zoning restrictions within the urban area doesn’t happen until after we open up huge greenfield areas for sprawl, then it seems likely that we’ll only repeat what’s happened in much of Auckland’s past: more sprawl than we’d thought, less intensification than we wanted, and poorer outcomes all round.
By Patrick Reynolds, on March 6th, 2012 The housing affordability dimension to the urban sprawl versus intensification argument is a messy debate. While limiting land supply through measures such as urban limits is likely to have a significant impact on land prices around the limit itself, it’s hard to know for sure what the impact of opening up land on the urban edge would have on prices throughout the majority of the city – particularly in the inner areas where it seems people most want to live.
 Albany 2011 Another complicating matter is fairly obvious – the further out people are, the more they’re likely to spend on transportation costs. Potentially this additional expense could counter any affordability gain we get (should that even exist) from opening up new land on the periphery. A recent Atlantic Cities article picks up on this matter:
Housing policymakers have long lamented the trend of home-buyers who “drive to qualify.” If they can’t find anything affordable in the city, house hunters wander farther and father out in search of a mortgage or a rent payment that matches their pocketbook. But of course, there’s a serious flaw in this thinking: The farther you go in search of cheaper housing, the more expensive your transportation costs become.
Scott Bernstein of the Center for Neighborhood Technology calls this “the hidden cost of housing location,” and CNT has for several years been trying to illustrate the tradeoff for homeowners and government officials who may not realize gallons of gas add up almost as fast as mortgage payments do. The Chicago-based organization maintains a massive, geo-coded database of location-specific information on average housing costs, driving rates, transportation costs, and transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. The online, interactive index is both highly useful in allowing comparisons of typical household costs in different locations and highly revealing as it illuminates the benefits of close-in, walkable neighborhoods in bringing those costs down.
Remember we’re only talking about the cost to individuals here. The vastly increased costs of providing infrastructure to urban sprawl is in addition to this. So what kind of results do we get from taking a more holistic point of view of affordability – taking into account transport and housing costs.
Analyzing all this data in aggregate, CNT found that, between 2000 and 2009, U.S. transportation and housing costs increased at nearly twice the rate of incomes. But the good news, the organization reports, is that people living in “location efficient” neighborhoods—those with good access to transit, jobs, and amenities—experienced only half the increase in transportation costs ($1,400/year) of those living in car-dependent places ($3,900/year). This means more expensive housing may actually be the more affordable option, if that housing exists in the right place.
Suddenly New York City, with its notoriously high housing costs, looks a little more affordable with the nation’s lowest average annual transportation costs for a big metro region. Households around seemingly more affordable Birmingham, on the other hand, spend on average nearly $5,000 a year more than those in the New York region do just to get around.
It’s worth keeping in mind that transportation costs also have the ability to go up really quickly too – as we saw in 2008 most particularly. The article also goes on to highlight that places in the USA with the highest rates of mortgage foreclosure have also been places where transportation costs are really high:
CNT’s index reveals, for example, that high transportation costs are highly correlated with foreclosure rates. This isn’t surprising given that transportation typically represents a family’s second biggest expense.
On one location on the south side of Rapid City, South Dakota, for instance, the index shows that an average home costs 26 percent of median income. But, given average driving rates for the location, the costs of housing and transportation considered together balloon to 56 percent of median income. The Index also shows that the average household in the vicinity generates more than 8.6 tons per year of greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. Average emissions per household in the most accessible neighborhoods on CNT’s map are between 5.1 and 6.5 tons per year.
 Albany 2011 I really worry that these Greenfield areas the Auckland Plan proposes to open up could become future slums when petrol prices spike in the future, making it unaffordable in a transport sense to live in such a peripheral location. Especially as right now despite the persistent highs of oil on the international market price at the pump in NZ has remained relatively calm because of the steadily rising NZD . This could change very quickly; $3 or $4 per litre is not unlikely, all it would take is the NZD to return to its historical average levels and oil to continue its steady march upward ["It's highly likely that the Reserve Bank will make some strongly worded comments against the currency's strength."Herald 5 March]. Either way the ‘suburbanisation of poverty’ that is noticeable in the US looks like it is heading to Auckland, with the poor priced off the road and subject to another American expression: ‘No transit: No job’.
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