Fertile Land Needs Protection Under Housing Plan – Auckland Councillor

Monday, 15 July 2024, 5:52 pm
Article: Torika Tokalau - Local Democracy Reporter

An Auckland councillor says the Government's plan to boost housing is just more "Wellington officials determining what is right for our area".

The Government announced this week an ambitious plan to increase housing supply by easing planning rules in cities across the country.

It has raised concerns among some councillors that urban sprawl could impact fertile rural land in Auckland.

Franklin ward councillor Andrew Baker said he supported some of the changes but his region didn't want to become "just more suburbs of Auckland".

"I am concerned that this is a continuation of Wellington officials determining what is right for our area," Baker said.

On Thursday, Housing and Resource Management Act Reform Minister Chris Bishop announced the proposed changes to the country's planning laws.

The changes will force cities to expand outwards at the urban fringe, enable mixed-use developments and remove the council's power to mandate balconies or minimum floor area sizes for developments.

Bishop said the plan would flood the market with affordable land to develop, and make it easier and cheaper to develop that land into housing.

In Auckland, the Rural-Urban Boundary will be abolished as a planning instrument, making it easier to build new houses in existing urban areas, and establish an effective "right to build" new houses on city fringes.

Baker said the rural urban boundary in Pukekohe was established through a thorough community-based planning process, prior to the draft Unitary Plan.

"On the basis that the area has some of the most important rural land in the country.

"The NPS HPL (National Policy Statement for Highly Productive Land) goes someway to protect that land, but the feeling in Franklin is that we do not particularly want to be just more suburbs of Auckland contiguous to the existing urban suburbs."

Manurewa-Papakura councillor Angela Dalton said they were still assessing the detail of the announcement, but it was important for Auckland that fertile lands remained protected for food growth.

"Auckland Council has housing growth capacity for 30 years, [and we] need to understand what live zoning ... will mean in terms of infrastructure provision in both green and brownfields development."

Councillor Daniel Newman said it was crucial that the Medium Density Residential Standards, which eases planning rules for what can be built without a resource consent, was made voluntary in his Manurewa-Papakura ward.

"Because I support abandoning that standard through much of urban Manurewa and Papakura," Newman said.

“There is significant existing capacity in the operative Auckland Unitary Plan, and [the council] have been staunchly committed to preserving the character and profile of communities that are already under pressure.

"I don’t want to see, by way of example, a weakening of protections such as the Special Character Overlay to retains Hillpark’s tree protections and consequential single house zone because of a rushed effort to make operative the intensification of the adjacent Manurewa Town Centre and walkable catchment.”

Newman said it was possible to see growth in greenfields, but the infrastructure costs will need to be met by the developers and their clients.

"None of this will be cheap," he said.

“What is clear is that vital transport infrastructure such as the Mill Road corridor must be progressed as soon as possible.”

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.

© Scoop Media

Local Democracy Reporting

Content from the Local Democracy Reporting (LDR) service is published by Scoop as a registered New Zealand Media Outlet LDR Partner.