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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 March 31st, 2012 It’s logical that when housing supply does not meet housing demand, prices will rise. Housing affordability is a huge issue in many cities around the world – with the blame often falling on planning rules and restrictions: both in the form of restrictions on sprawl and restrictions on the level of intensification. While there’s a logical connection between a lack of housing supply and higher housing costs, it is perhaps a little more complicated if we start to take this connection and apply it through saying that if we build a lot more dwellings we will start to make a positive difference to affordability.
For a start, there are two different ways in which we might try to improve affordability by constructing more housing supply: building more houses on the urban edge and building more houses through urban intensification. As many previous posts have pointed out on this blog there are likely to be a number of ‘false economies’ if you attempt to improve affordability by allowing urban expansion. Not only are many of the housing cost savings likely to simply be eaten up in transport cost increases, but there’s an enormous hidden cost in such an approach: all the additional infrastructure that’s required. An interesting Australian research paper suggests that the infrastructure costs of servicing urban expansion rather than urban intensification are huge:  There are really only two ways to pay for the additional infrastructure costs of urban expansion. The first option gets development in peripheral areas to properly ‘pay its way’ – adding huge development contributions to the cost of each dwelling and therefore significantly undermining the ability of this development to actually be affordable. The second option, which seems to be what happens in a lot of American cities that provide ‘affordable’ housing on their peripheries, is to hugely subsidise that development – largely through not requiring it to pay fully for the infrastructure necessary to service it. But then there’s a bit of a logic gap here – why is the rest of the city helping to subsidise those on the periphery who contribute most to congestion, the urbanisation of farmland, probably the greatest amount of CO2 emissions per capita and so on?
The other option is to provide a lot more housing through intensification. This is more logical in a number of ways:
- You have lower infrastructure costs on a per capita basis and therefore the existing city either doesn’t need to subsidise the new development as much, or the development contributions don’t need to be so high.
- Most demand seems to be for inner-city housing (that’s where prices are increasing so dramatically), so you provide housing where people actually want to live.
- You avoid the ‘trade-off’ between housing affordability and transport affordability. More affordable housing in inner areas really will be more affordable for its inhabitants and they won’t see the gain eaten away at the fuel pump.
Harvard economist Edward Glaeser is a big proponent of the concept that you need to build your way out of affordability problems – criticising (for example) Jane Jacobs who wanted to maintain a mix of building ages in an area – even if that came at the cost of allowing additional development. The paragraphs below come from Glaeser’s fascinating article in The Atlantic, which is an excerpt from his book “Triumph of the City”:
But then, during the 1950s and ’60s, both public and private projects ran into growing resistance from grassroots organizers like Jane Jacobs, who were becoming adept at mounting opposition to large-scale development. In 1961, Jacobs published her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which investigates and celebrates the pedestrian world of mid-20th-century New York. She argued that mixed-use zoning fostered street life, the essence of city living. But Jacobs liked protecting old buildings because of a confused piece of economic reasoning. She thought that preserving older, shorter structures would somehow keep prices affordable for budding entrepreneurs. That’s not how supply and demand works. Protecting an older one-story building instead of replacing it with a 40-story building does not preserve affordability. Indeed, opposing new building is the surest way to make a popular area unaffordable. An increase in the supply of houses, or anything else, almost always drives prices down, while restricting the supply of real estate keeps prices high.
The relationship between housing supply and affordability isn’t just a matter of economic theory. A great deal of evidence links the supply of space with the cost of real estate. Simply put, the places that are expensive don’t build a lot, and the places that build a lot aren’t expensive. Perhaps a new 40-story building won’t itself house any quirky, less profitable firms, but by providing new space, the building will ease pressure on the rest of the city. Price increases in gentrifying older areas will be muted because of new construction. Growth, not height restrictions and a fixed building stock, keeps space affordable and ensures that poorer people and less profitable firms can stay and help a thriving city remain successful and diverse. Height restrictions do increase light, and preservation does protect history, but we shouldn’t pretend that these benefits come without a cost.
This is an interesting debate, because of what Glaeser hints at halfway through his second paragraph: that while the new buildings themselves may not be affordable, they should contribute to an improvement in affordability by increasing general supply. The rationale seems to be that richer people currently living in older houses/apartments will shift to the shiny new houses/apartments, and their older houses will be less valuable and therefore more affordable. I’m not entirely sure whether I follow that logic. It makes sense for office space, as companies able to afford premium space generally lease it and therefore are keen to occasionally “trade up” to the shiny new buildings – leaving their previous space more affordable and now available for a second-tier of companies to shift into. But when it comes to housing, I’m not entirely sure whether building more inner-area apartments and terraced housing is going to make existing housing in that area too much less attractive for prospective buyers. In effect, you’ll have the choice of older lower-density housing or newer higher-density housing (which will probably be constructed to a fairly flash standard). Neither of those sounds particularly affordable to me.
This interesting Glaeser/Jacobs debate was picked up on in a post on the superb City Builder Book Club blog, which is going through Jane Jacobs’s masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, chapter by chapter:
One of the most insightful observations that she makes about old buildings is that their capital costs have been written down and therefore the landlord does not need to charge a high rent. New construction is very expensive. It takes 20 or 30 years for a developer to pay off the mortgage. It is only then that there is less pressure on the owner to charge high rents.
This simple observation has recently been questioned. Edward Glaeser (Harvard economist and author of last year’s book, Triumph of the City), for example, has completely misunderstood this chapter. Glaeser asserts that keeping old buildings leads to nothing but high rents — that it’s a simple issue of supply and demand. He tells us that the only way to go is up, up, up, and if towers were built in the place of these older, smaller buildings, districts like Greenwich Village in cities all over the world would become far more affordable. That is, more density equals lower rents.
Can you think of anywhere you’ve seen that happen? It certainly has not been my experience in the past decade of tall building construction in Toronto. Nor has it been the case anywhere in Manhattan that I am aware of. It probably isn’t the case in your city either. I cannot think of an example in an economically healthy city where an old building was torn down and replaced by a new taller/bigger structure and this new structure has cheaper rent than the building it replaced.
It is certainly quite fascinating to compare these two argument – both of which seem to make logical sense, but at the same time find themselves almost diametrically opposed. What perhaps this highlights to us is that to improve affordability, we need to be a bit more specific than simply saying “expand housing supply”. What really needs to happen is a specific expansion of affordable housing supply. Perhaps the final word on this matter should go to this recent blog post by Cap’n Transit – looking at housing affordability and New York:
Suppose that tomorrow there’s a revolution in New York City. Zoning and rent control are abolished, and every member of the City Planning Commission and the community boards is sent off to the reeducation camps. Spreading out from the Empire State Building, developers cover the New York area in parking-free high-rises until there’s enough housing for everyone, at affordable prices. Sounds great, right?
Almost. But all housing is not created equal. Some apartments are bigger, some have better views, some have are more conveniently located. Some come with relatively superficial amenities like pools and package services. Some are dangerous or bad for your health, from crime, pollution, bad construction or neglect.
Some housing differences are a matter of taste, like neighbors who play loud salsa music or cook Indian food. Some people choose their housing out of racism, moving out if a Black family moves in. Some people want to live near people like them. Some people want to live where there is ethnic diversity, with no single group dominating.
All these factors affect the price of the housing. People who can’t afford higher rents will necessarily have to put up with some undesirable features, like bad views, loud music, crime or a long commute…
…There is a more market-oriented solution, though: build more cheap housing. And cheap housing is bad housing. The next question is: bad in what way?
If the only determinant of an apartment’s price is its distance from job centers, then the poor and the young will all wind up living on the outskirts of town, paying for their poverty with long inconvenient commutes. If the only determinant of price is proximity to a hazardous waste dump, or neglected housing stock, or gang activity, then the poor and the young will wind up in substandard housing, exposed to toxins and victimized by gangs. If the only determinant of price is proximity to “the right people,” then the poor will wind up clustered together, having little contact with other social classes.
To prevent segregating the poor into inconveniently located bad housing with crime and pollution, we need to make some safe, solid housing available closer in, integrated with the rich people’s housing. that is still affordable. In order to do that, we need to allow housing that’s cheap in the non-dangerous, non-segregated ways. That means housing that’s small or ugly, with crappy views and no doormen. Maybe housing that allows loud music if it doesn’t bother anyone else.
Ironically, a good example of this in the Auckland context are the much maligned ‘sausage flats’ built in the 1960s. While they’re pretty much universally disliked from an architectural point of view, they provide quite a lot of relatively affordable housing in places where people actually want to live (Mt Eden, Epsom, Three Kings, Herne Bay etc.) Their aesthetic unattractiveness, in a somewhat bizarre way, has ensured that they remain affordable and means that the supply of relatively affordable housing in inner Auckland is significantly greater than it would otherwise be.
I guess the key point is that just as building more 5 bedroom McMansions on the urban edge won’t make a blind bit of difference to housing affordability, building super-flash inner city apartments, townhouses and terraced houses is also unlikely to help. Clearly, constrained housing supply leads to housing becoming unaffordable, but to resolve that we need to not only build more houses generally, we need to build more affordable houses. How to do that in a way that still allows developers to make a sufficient level of profit for them to bother is perhaps one of the biggest questions facing Auckland in the next few years.
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’.
By Patrick Reynolds, on February 29th, 2012 It won’t be enough for the council to just say where it would like development for the expected growth of Auckland to take place will be, it will have to actively facilitate growth to take place in the most desirable areas. How could it do this? Well it could do a lot worse than by starting here:
This is an award winning analysis of how to accommodate Melbourne’s expected growth along transit corridors by Professor Rob Adams. It is well worth reading the whole document, it is not overly technical, well illustrated, and short!
Melbourne faces the same issues as Auckland, only more so; expecting to double it’s population from 4 million to 8 million by 2050. The stresses of this are enormous. This study expands on earlier work based around the rail corridors so therefore is only focussed on the road corridors, however the principles are the same; build along the transit corridors and preserve the character of the existing dormitory suburbs. It concludes that it is possible to accommodate 2.4 million extra people on about 6% of the city’s land. It starts by considering the additional costs of continuing to spread:
The need for change there as here is obvious:
 The authors identify the areas where it is appropriate to facilitate growth:
And areas to maintain the current quality:
And importantly the scale of development is firmly controlled in the areas of stability but higher density building is actively facilitated in the proscribed areas:
There is a great deal of detail around where and how to achieve this in the study. The scale of the problem in Auckland is smaller, but so is the available land. Wouldn’t it be great to see if this approach is possible here? Of course we’ll also have improve the standard, reach, frequency, and quality of the city’s public transport as well.
By Patrick Reynolds, on February 25th, 2012 An article in Wednesday’s NZ Herald confirms the worst-held fears of many: that Auckland Council is shifting away from mostly focusing on growing the city over the next 30 years through intensification to putting a larger number of people on the urban edge.
Auckland Council has eased up on its vision of squeezing residents up closer by keeping 75 per cent of new housing on existing land and just 25 per cent outside the limits within the next three decades.
Instead, it is now discussing a 60/40 split, which the development sector is hailing as a victory after intense opposition and lobbying and independent reports which criticised the original scheme as unworkable.
Admin did quite a few posts on the sprawl/intensification split in the draft Auckland Plan, highlighting that even that plan actually provided for a significant amount of urban sprawl. While the yellow boxes look fairly small, put them together and you get an idea about how much current farmland is proposed to be turned into housing over the next 30 years – even under the proposed plan!  One does wonder how much bigger these boxes must be to accommodate an even greater proportion of population growth in areas outside the current urban limits. Plus, of course, the 60/40 split is not actually a split between greenfield and intensification, but rather a split between development inside the urban limit and outside the urban limit. There are still significant areas inside the urban limits that haven’t been developed yet, like Long Bay, Flat Bush and Takanini. There’s room for around 30,000 dwellings in these areas – a not insignificant amount!
So, let’s take a look at the numbers in three scenarios, known generally as 75/25, 70/30 and 60/40: So if we put percentage values on this we actually find that the 60/40 split, for example, is much closer to 50/50: 
By way of comparison, in 2006 there were 145,000 dwellings in the whole of the former Auckland City. Less than the number of “Greenfield outside the MUL” dwellings proposed over the next 30 years.
At the very least, I suppose, we can hope that the planning for these new greenfield communities would be done well and perhaps they could become excellent urban areas where we put all our learnings of the past 50 years about how not to do urban development into practice and actually, for a change, build new areas that aren’t mind-numbingly depressing like Dannemora, Albany and what’s been built of Flat Bush so far. But, it seems that won’t happen either, as much of the urban sprawl will be rushed in during the first decade (which also undermines all our efforts at intensification during that time). Back to the Herald article:
The image of high-rise hell in heritage waterfront suburbs such as Birkenhead and Northcote caused an outcry and Property Council chief executive Connal Townsend said yesterday he was pleased about the apparent relaxation in the council’s policy.
“The really interesting thing is that the 75/25 split was due to kick in at the start of the plan. I understand the new arrangement places high emphasis on greenfields development in the first 10 years, with a requirement for high quality dense development to get the market used to it as an approach.”
So we build sprawl like mad for the first decade and maybe do some intensification later. Sounds a bit like our transport policy: build heaps of roads now and maybe some public transport later.
It seems like the Auckland Plan is turning into a transformational shift – transforming us right back to 1950s planning and transport policy.
By Patrick Reynolds, on January 30th, 2012 A plainly daft piece on the proposed Auckland Plan by Bill Ralston recently appeared in the NZ Listener. In it he claims, completely without any reason, that the plan sets out to demolish where he lives, as well as every other desirable part of Auckland in the name of instensification. This is simply untrue. It is true that the Plan hopes to encourage Auckland to continue to become a more intensive city, but not by demolishing the very best bits, or even very much of it at all. In fact it is decidedly half-hearted about containing the spread outwards, even proposing 140,000 new detached houses be built in the next 30 years under one scenario. All on what is currently productive and attractive distant countryside, and all to be served by endlessly and expensively rolling out new services: From the current 385,000 detached houses to 526,000! Did you actually read the thing, Bill?
In any case, intensification is clearly a matter of degree and the areas proposed for the kind of high density high rise growth that so alarms dear old Bill [but of course not everyone], is all carefully allotted to currently empty or underused commercial ‘brownfields’ sites on transport corridors in areas like the CBD, Glen Innes, and New Lynn. Not Bill’s neck of the woods. Other areas are intended to be encouraged to move from low to medium density. Bill’s place isn’t on this list either.
Ironically, in light of this reaction, the type of intensification that would go a long way to both accommodating Auckland’s growth and greatly improving our quality of life is about trying to help more of Auckland more closely resemble Bill’s very own suburb. His suburb is, in fact, a role model for how much of Auckland ideally could be. But that isn’t by repeating the thing that Bill thinks his ‘burb is all about, the appearance of the buildings, but rather about how they are organised. Not architectural design, but urban design. Really, how?
Freemans Bay is, along with St Mary’s Bay, Herne Bay, Parnell, Devonport, Northcote, Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, and Mt Eden, a highly sought after and therefore expensive bit of old Auckland. So it is worth asking what is so good about it?
Well most of the buildings are old. That’s it isn’t it? Most people love old houses, with their mature trees, and in Auckland that means Victorian and Edwardian houses, usually detached wooden dwellings. Unlike Sydney, Auckland isn’t old enough to have Georgian buildings and also unlike Sydney or Dunedin there wasn’t the resource of stone or even much brick to compete with the pillage of the native forests that our forebears felt so entitled to use so completely. Furthermore, in a reversal of the trend of the second half of the last century we have recently been rediscovering the advantages of these close-in old suburbs. So instead of looking on these areas as slums and bulldozing them wholesale in order to build motorways as we did from the 1960s we have recently been turning houses like this one: More and more into houses like this one:
But that isn’t the whole story is it? Properly understood three factors make Freemans Bay such a great place to live, and only one of them is the irreplaceable age of the structures. And this is important because while we can’t time-travel and build real Victorian houses again we can take the best urban design features from these areas to improve what we build next, and even fix other parts of the existing city with these ideas too. The three essential features, in no particular order, that make Freemans Bay so desirable are:
1. Physical Heritage
2. Proximity to the centre
3. Population density
All the things that you may like about Freemans Bay flow from these; for example, great cafés and shops? They are a function of the quantity of people around and the desirability of the place, which in turn is because of the density of the housing and the proximity to the centre of town. Retail businesses need enough customers, and specialised ones need an even higher number going by because their appeal is, by definition, narrow.
But hang on, waddaymean population density?, this is just a suburb with detached houses and some shops isn’t it?, same as Dannemora or Botany? Well it isn’t high density but it is medium density and is considerably higher than most more recent suburbs. And here’s how: As this post by Admin shows, when looked at in detail you can see that the narrow streets and painted shiplap conceal a clever spatial order that maximises private space yet retains public charm. It is in fact this spatial order, and its resultant density of population that sustains the local businesses and other amenities all at close proximity.
Of course old buildings add texture and charm, but it is important urban design features and not architectural ones that make the real structural differences. Let’s look at Bill’s favourite café, mentioned in his article: Agnes Curran. Yes it is in a building pleasingly made of plastered brick and the door to the rooms above are surrounded by Georgian style decoration, lovely. But let’s look at everything else that makes this a really successful streetscape and business. The café occupies a tiny space about the size of two car parks, it is right up to the generous footpath, a footpath separated from the traffic by mature Plane trees [with a new one recently added on the right], the trees also accommodate a limited number of on-street car parks. A small apartment building to the left of the shot is smack up the boundary with the cafe and the footpath, and there are other levels of accommodation above retail spaces on the main road. Thus there is an extremely tight integration of the residential and commercial functions of this neighbourhood; so everyone walks, no need to drive when your destination is already right there. Here it is from above: The cafe is in the alley between the grey and reddish rooves at bottom left. Occupying the space that would have to be given over to off-street parking were this a new building- by current council regulation. Note that the houses are closer than is currently allowed in new subdivisions, and that their garden space is all together in one piece at the rear of each house. Small, but all usable, and private. And Ponsonby Rd is, by Auckland standards, relatively well served by public transport, especially in the form of the frequent new Inner Link bus service, connecting this place to the CBD, the universities, the hospital, everything really. It is easy to see that this is quite an intensely built place, but also pleasantly leafy, and is in fact at the intersection of two pretty busy roads; Ponsonby and Franklin. How can it be of such density but still be so pleasant, it must be the design of the buildings? Well that is of course important, but how much they appeal to you is really a matter of personal taste, no, it has much more to do with what is not visible in this picture. To show what that is lets have a look at a cafe in a more recent part of town: Dunkin Donuts at Botany Downs courtesy of Google [sorry but I'm not going there]. And from above: Well in fact there’s a whole lot of food outlets on in this image, a KFC, a seafood place, as well as Dunkin Donuts. And yup they are all pretty nasty new buildings, built to a price and without any conviction that they mean to stay. But also note there are no houses or apartments of any kind here and no one walking. But there is the one amenity that is almost entirely absent from the earlier scene. This is a place rich in carparking. Viewed from above or from street level it is clear that this is a place entirely made for the movement and storage of cars. Yes you can argue that that what most distinguishes the natures of these two places is the age and design of the structures, but it is also clear that the spatial organisation is at least as important a difference. Put simply the first is designed for people and the second for cars. The first has a higher density of humans and the second of machines. The first, of course, commands much higher values and is where Bill wants to live. And the first, while more expensive to buy into, is actually cheaper to live in, because the intensity of the place means the costs of movement are much lower. It is a place that you can easily function without a car at all for example [As local resident, Bill, says in this article].
But of course the people living Freemans Bay do still use cars, but unlike those that live in the these new areas, they don’t have to use them just to get to their local café or other common local amenity, like schools, workplaces, or bars. They walk more and they use public transport more. Why? not because they are cleverer than the people in Dannemora but because their area was designed for those choices to be the most obvious, most productive, and most enjoyable things to do. And we can spread more of this simple genius to other parts of our city, even Botany, if can just reverse the insane auto-centric planning priorities of the last fifty years. This means putting people at the centre of the spatial organisation of places. It means repealing the rules that insist that the car must be catered for first. And it means for many of our primarily residential areas mixing the living and working and playing in the kind of intense proximity that Bill enjoys in Freemans Bay.
And it also means that we must provide systems of movement that do not devalue the very places they are meant to serve. Which of course means fast, frequent, smart, public transit. Something lacking in the newer suburb.
Furthermore, if we can get those planning settings right and are able to encourage the kind of spatial organisation that Bill enjoys so unconsciously in Freemans Bay, it is highly likely that we will see the design of the individual buildings in these places improve significantly, because increased intensity of humans also means increased intensity of economic activity. And, of course, because it involves unlocking the land and the resources currently tied up so unproductively in providing so much amenity for vehicles.
We can have Freemans Bay’s qualities of urban design in other places with contemporary design and technologies, after all Freemans Bay isn’t all old buildings and is all the better for it. It isn’t a museum. Here are two quite different and award winning recent detached houses there, The first by Marsh Cook: And the second by Malcolm Walker: Freemans Bay also has contemporary buildings by Mitchell + Stout, Stevens Lawson, Fearon Hay, Andrew Patterson, and more. Along with council pensioner flats, town houses, and apartment buildings.
And remember, while The Plan doesn’t envisage the core of Freemans Bay changing much at all, it does for some other underperforming areas of Auckland. And as the picture below of Freemans Bay in 1877 shows change is always possible, and can be a very good thing indeed……… Anyway, why shouldn’t more Aucklanders get the chance to enjoy their neighbourhood as much as our friend Bill Ralston enjoys his?
By Patrick Reynolds, on January 27th, 2012 It’s hard not to get the feeling that for some in the Auckland Plan debate the answer is simply that they just need to get out more. Yes I’m thinking of you Dick Quax. But also Bill Ralston, whose advancing years seem to have settled upon him as a sort of domestic panic; a fear that some one will take his villa away. And the always unreadable and wrong Jim Hopkins. Plus all the other forces that appear to to be running a coordinated campaign against the plan, like the National Party’s pollster David Farrar, who enjoys apartment living himself but whose politics means he has to twist into a funny shape to conjure up bogus arguments against city life, he claims for example that to live in an apartment you can’t have a pet or a family, and imagines Ak turning into East Berlin. So in order to help those who seem to have absolutely no conception that life in Auckland is possible, for some even preferable, outside of a detached suburban 3 bedder I have dipped into my archives. These are simply random examples of the rich variety of lives lived by different people with different interests and different resources already enjoying the ‘absolutely gobsmacking‘ life that so terrifies the good councillor Quax.
I would also add that one area that the recent analysis of the Auckland Plan by Studio D4 and Jasmax did not look at was the inner city itself. There is clearly a great deal of opportunity for increased living in the city as the people pictured below already are. New supermarkets are opening in the city now and of course there is still room for further infrastructure to support and improve living, working and playing in the CBD. But of course I am not, and nor is the Plan, arguing that high or even medium density is to everyones’ taste, but that when given the chance there are many you do seek it. And that these include the young and the old, families with kids, groups of flatmates and people living alone, rich and poor, renters and owners, and every kind of race and outlook, pet owners, new agers and right wingers, strugglers, idlers, and toilers- in short, every kind of person.
First up, meet my mother. Her apartment is in a re-purposed commercial building from the early 20th century. Pretty special and very well placed for public transit as you can see [she can no longer drive]. Also ideal for a single elderly person, extremely secure, all on one level, the building has a concierge and is incredibly handy to both necessities and distractions. The only thing that hasn’t worked well is interaction with health agencies who insist on driving, often just from the hospital, and then of course, parking. They then want reimbursement for these costs although the services are free. Naturally they will happily drive to Albany or Cockle Bay and those costs are clearly buried somewhere in the health budget. Doh! Small problem, but indicative of how deeply imbedded auto-dependency is in our institutions.
The Bolletta family on a very grey evening, for them an apartment offers an affordable way for the young family to live centrally.
The Urale family. OK this is a detached house, but a new one on a tiny Freemans Bay site with no off street parking. Designed for the family by Malcolm Walker Architects, and therefore qualifies as both medium density and urban renewal.
Also a new building, but higher density. Fashion and publishing personality Paula Ryan in her waterfront apartment.
Again High-D, but different location, Newton, and different value. Complete with art loving cat.
 The loveliest of Auckland’s far-too-few Heritage apartments: Courtville flatmates.
 A return to the original use: Living above the business. Gallerist Michael Lett in his modernised flat over his old gallery space on K’Rd. The first occupants of this Victorian or Edwardian building doubtless did the same. But with as much style?
Another residential conversion. Compact apartment in the old George Courts Building ideal for young couple.
Inner city living is also for the young at heart: Peter Bromhead in his crisp apartment that will soon be looking down on the new Parnell Train Station.
Those genuinely concerned about housing affordability need to understand that even sweeping views of the CMJ is no barrier to successful rental or ownership for many if the price is right. Very serious students with a very relaxed cat included.
I could go on but the post would get too long…
By Patrick Reynolds, on January 26th, 2012 As there’s been a lot of discussion about population density here I figure this post from good ol’ Cap’nTransit is on the money. Yes this is my view too, you think more density is needed? Well build the transit and the density will follow [all else being equal], foolish to try to wait for some ideal density then meet that demand with infrastructure. Transit supply is causative. Or as the Cap’n says: ‘The population density to support my ass’
Here are two interesting posts on Twitter and Transit. One beautiful the other more for the quants. Both instructive.
The second is via Atlantic Cities where there is also this argument for High Speed Rail in the Union’s most populous State, California. Newt of the GOP has been banging on about the US heading back to the moon in some kind of pissing contest with China, but frankly if they can’t even get a train to run from SF to LA and any decent speed I think he’ed better dodge that race. *Note for Geoff: These arguments here for HSR are intended as a metaphor for local arguments for urban transit, not as a literal argument for HSR in NZ. Same things apply, land use transformations, economic return not a financial one etc, but at a vastly different scale.
More from the States on gas prices [as they call them] and what to do, and for once this doesn’t involve bombing somewhere else or other wise frackin’ it all up.
Closer to home; no round up from me will be complete without at least a passing note on resource supply issues. As we head to the exciting singularity of peak damn near everything it’s good to see some people have their heads up. Here’s an introductory note from across the ditch, what I especially like about this is that it states a view that I also have, namely that it could just be that a world with less freely available oil may well be a lot better in a number of ways; once we’ve made the adjustment. Like London after the peasoup smog and mountains of horse-shit. I’m also guessing less isolation, more localiasation, more human interaction, less alienation. Perhaps more meaningful lives. Perhaps.
There’s also this guy, Denis Tegg, I know nothing about him but he has been manfully plugging away on this issue in NZ for a while and here he is bringing an important shelved report to the surface. I say manfully because there is a really creepy silence on this issue and Climate Change in the mainstream media and in government in NZ. It’s like if we don’t mention these problems they’ll just go away.
Look away Actoids! Here’s a well reasoned piece on the attractions and limitations of neoliberalism. It’s short too. Relevant how? Transit like our cities need long term planning, by elected bodies. The market is a great tool, but a lousy master, and an even worse god. As I think we’ve just seen.
Those interested in the strange ways that change can happen will like this. Why the US Marine Corp may well lead the US into a solar future.
Back to transit, and more personally; I have new wheels, yay! and loving it, but won’t be going to these extremes to protect them. No.
By admin, on January 26th, 2012 You would think that calculating, and analysing, the density of a city would be a fairly perfunctory mathematical task, and would tell us useful information about the nature of that city. As I noted in this previous blog post, perhaps the most challenging aspect of calculating a city’s ‘average density’ is working out where its boundaries are. For Auckland, there are a variety of boundaries and therefore a variety of average densities.  But even that approach can lead to some surprising results – as pointed out in Paul Mees’s book “Transport for Suburbia”, New York and Los Angeles have a similar density, so do Vancouver and Las Vegas. Yet each city has a significantly different level of public transport usage. Mees puts this down to the quality of public transport provision being more important than density when it comes to ridership, although equally one could also start asking questions about how we’ve measured density – especially as saying Los Angeles and New York have the same density just seems to be so incorrect.
The issue of density is looked at in detail in this excellent article by Eric Eidlin, a community planner and Sustainable Communities Partnership Liaison for the Federal Transit Administration in San Francisco. He questions whether average density over the whole metropolitan area is really a particularly useful figure when assessing how ‘dense’ or ‘sprawled’ in reality an urban area is. He presents the conundrum we face when looking at density:
Many people …tend to think of “sprawling” cities as places where people make most of their trips by car, and non-sprawling cities as places where people are more likely to walk, cycle, or take transit. This is why Los Angeles, which has more vehicles per square mile than any other urbanized area, and where transit accounts for only two percent of the region’s overall trips, is considered sprawling, while the New York urbanized area is not. We also know (or think we know) that places where people frequently walk, cycle, or take transit tend to have high population densities, and for this reason we tend to view low density as a proxy for sprawl. But as it turns out, the Los Angeles urbanized area—which in both myth and fact is very car-oriented—is also very dense. In fact, Los Angeles has been the densest urbanized area in the United States since the 1980s, denser even than New York and San Francisco.
These facts present a bit of a mystery. If one were to measure sprawl by measuring a region’s average level of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), Los Angeles would certainly qualify as sprawling. But if we measure sprawl by population density, LA would not sprawl at all. In fact, it would be the least sprawling urbanized area in the country. How can Los Angeles be so dense and yet also exhibit so many characteristics associated with sprawl, including high levels of car travel (both in per capita and absolute terms) and low rates of walking, bicycling and transit ridership?
A useful way we can start deconstructing the issue of density is to think of two A4 pieces of paper, each with 100 dots on it. On one piece of paper each dot is equally spaced, while on the other piece of paper the dots cluster together in places and are very widely spaced in other places.
Overall, both pieces of paper have the same average density of dots. But really, their distribution is very different. If each dot was to represent 100 people and the paper represented a city, you would have vastly different cities even though their overall density is the same. This is explained in the article:
Sprawl is a regional attribute, so when observers point out that LA is denser than New York, they are not talking about the cities of Los Angeles and New York. Rather they are talking about the urbanized area, which is essentially the combined area of the cities and their suburbs. The other part of the answer is that density by itself—the simple ratio of population to square mile—is not a very useful way to measure sprawl. What matters is the distribution of density, or how evenly or unevenly an area’s population is spread out across its geographic area. If we look at the density distribution in Los Angeles, we notice that its suburbs are much denser than those of other large U.S. cities, such as New York, San Francisco or Chicago. These high-density suburbs compensate for the comparatively low density of LA’s urban core, and, in so doing, increase the average density of the area as a whole. In other words, Los Angeles has both a relatively high density and a relatively even distribution of density throughout its urbanized area.
So, if we continue to use our “dots on a piece of paper” example, Los Angeles would be much closer to the evenly spaced dots example, whereas New York has a huge concentration of dots in its inner area (Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn and parts of Queens in particular) and then quite widely spaced dots further out (outer Long Island, north into New York state and west into New Jersey).
It’s pretty clear then that ‘average density’ over a whole urban area doesn’t really tell us too much about the characteristics of that urban area. But how might we examine density in a more helpful way? The article, thankfully, provides us with some options:
One approach is to measure the extent to which the population density varies across an urban area. Using a statistical tool called the Gini coefficient, we can get a sense of the degree of variation for different urban areas. The Gini coefficient is based on the Lorenz curve, a cumulative frequency curve that compares the distribution of a specific variable (in this case, population density) with a uniform distribution that represents perfect equality.
Using such a measure to compare Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco gives us the following results:
 You can see, in particular, how much more of New York and San Francisco’s population is concentrated in a small proportion of land area than in the case for Los Angeles. This is detailed further:
In Los Angeles, 40 percent of the population live on the most densely settled 10 percent of land. By way of comparison, roughly 66 percent of New York’s population, and 67 percent of San Francisco’s, live on the most densely settled ten percent of the land. By looking even further to the right of the graph, one finds that 25 percent of the population in Los Angeles lives on the densest 5 percent of the land. By contrast, 46 percent of San Francisco’s population, and more than 50 percent of New York’s, live on the densest 5 percent of the land. The overwhelming majority of New York and San Francisco’s residents live on a very small portion of their urbanized areas’ land. But this is much less the case in LA.
A second way of measuring density more helpfully is through what’s called ‘perceived density’. This weights the density of an area by the proportion of the area’s population that lives there, effectively measuring the average number of people around each resident of the city. The method of calculation is helpfully described by the example of the fictional city of Metropolis:
Metropolis has a central core of 100,000 residents who live on ten square miles of land and a suburb with 10,000 residents who live on 100 square miles of land. The standard density of Metropolis is 1,000 people per square mile. However, since 90 percent of the population—those who inhabit the core—live in a very dense environment, this standard density number has little bearing on the way most residents experience their city. By giving the core’s density a weight of 90 percent and the suburb’s density a weight of 10 percent—weights that are equal to the respective proportions of the city’s residents that inhabit each part—we get an adjusted density of 9,100 people per square mile, a number that more closely approximates the density at which the average resident of Metropolis lives.
Comparing the different US cities under this ‘perceived density’ measure gives the following results: Under this measurement system we see New York really standing out from any other city in the USA. Los Angeles is still fairly high up there though, in third place. And our comparison with public transport and walking – while better than average density – still doesn’t exactly align up perfectly.
A third measurement system is also included in the table above, the density gradient index. This is described below:
Bradford pushed the concept of perceived density a step further by developing the density gradient index. The density gradient index, which is the ratio of perceived density to standard density, is an indication of the unevenness of population distribution—or, to use Bradford’s terminology—a measure of “clumpiness.” Table 2 also shows the density gradient index for each urbanized area.
Overall, when comparing the different measurements of density with public transport use, we get the following:
Bradford did a regression analysis to analyze the relationship between perceived density and commute mode (the final two columns of Table 2). He found virtually no association between standard density and the percentage of workers commuting by public transit or walking, but a strong association between perceived density and commuting by transit or foot, and an even stronger association between the density gradient index and the percentage of workers commuting by transit or by foot.
What does that mean for Auckland? Well, until we can analyse our population distribution, perceived density and density gradient index, who knows whether we’re really at the same urban density as Sydney – like the average density statistics will tell us. The best graph I have seen so far is included below, and suggests that perhaps Auckland’s density is a little bit “Los Angeles” compared to Sydney’s “New York”. It would seem that if we’re thinking about land-use policies to boost public transport, walking (and presumably cycling) use, then it may be useful for the “lumpiness” of Auckland’s population density to increase – obviously particularly around our rapid transit network. Fortunately, that’s what most of our plans seem to propose.
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