In late January, the government announced it would be establishing a group to look into housing affordability and the Metropolitan Urban Limits (MULs) in Auckland. The basic argument is that houses cost too much, so allowing sprawl will reduce house prices Auckland wide.
But what is driving up house prices? Why isn’t intensification happening? Is allowing sprawl a good idea?
The basic answer is that sprawl is undesirable due to economic and environmental factors (which are covered later in the post) and we should try everything in our power to limit it until we have sensible district plans and parking requirements that will allow intensification to happen in an affordable and agreeable way.
In a city like Auckland where so much development has taken place after 1960 surely there are ample opportunities to use land more effectively. A while ago Admin posted about how much land is taken up in the Manukau CBD by parking and roads, this seems like as good a place as any to examine how to increase productive land use.
To understand where we want to end up, we need to understand where we’ve come from and where we are. Originally towns grew up around rivers and harbours as ships were the fastest means of transport around the country and globe, especially for freight, the port (work), your shop and public spaces all had to be within walking distance of your home. This lead to urban forms such as this:
http://www.johnsimpsonarchitects.com/urban/urban_01.html
Incredibly walkable? Yes, but not desirable today for three reasons; firstly the private motor vehicle is a very economically productive vehicle if available in moderation, (my general rule is, 1 car per family: an economic miracle, 4 cars per family: an economic disaster), this urban form has almost no provision for cars even in a fully user pays society, secondly unless there is a subway under there it is going to be hard to provide good public transport – there is no obvious grid system or room for public transport vehicles and finally we moved away from town planning such as this for a good reason: the tenement, the slum, the ghetto, whatever you want to call it the requirement to live within walking distance of provision for all of life’s needs led to some very cramped and unsanitary conditions.
The rise of railways then cars delinked walking and urban form and in true human style, fear of the tenement meant we took things a little too far, went car mad and ended up with this:
Now on an individual level, this is a very desirable place to spend your time and to live, but sprawl such as this is a disaster for a city environmentally and economically, it is hard to provide public transport and cycling for, walking is almost non-existent, land is needed for parking city wide pushing up land costs, it uses far too many resources, has high costs to provide utilities and leads to chronic congestion on main thoroughfares.
So what is desirable? I’d suggest a city where there is roading and parking provision for a motor car for every home but where if your household has more than one, the use of the second vehicle will require user pays parking and road use in almost every situation, this can be achieved by amending minimum parking requirements to maximums, good council monitoring of on street parking use which sets prices responsive to demand and congestion charges/COE permits. An urban form where there is a clear grid road system and a hierarchical public transport corridor every 1 km is also desirable.
So how could we amend the Manukau CBDs district plan to achieve this?
Here is the Manukau CBD as it is currently:
Quite simply a triumph of forgetting the importance of urban form, the tiny amount of land actually used for buildings is remarkable and the provision of parking makes catching public transport a unattractive prospect.
So what shape should the changes to the district plan take to achieve the kind of city outlined above? We can convert much of the land used as parking to multilevel, mixed use development and public space:
The white boxes are new buildings that the district plan allows to be between 3 – 5 stories, with retail on the street level and offices and apartments above, the red is the area retained for parking which is all metered and priced so it remains at 80% – 90% occupancy, the blue line in an extension of Osterley Way completing the grid in the CBD, the green area is a new park for the eastern CBD and the grey square is a new public square, pedestrianisation of streets such as Karoro Ct and Putney way from the new blue street to Wiri Station Rd could be implemented.
You’ll notice that new buildings all “front” the surrounding streets improving walkability and public transport access, public spaces are introduced as havens from cars and to further encourage public transport use and walkability. The key is that we start building our cities around people and not cars, that we create spaces where people want to be, not just where people want to go through. We don’t have to remove the car, we just need to tame it.
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Interestingly when I wrote my thesis on urban sprawl vs urban intensification in 2005 I very much thought of it as a tension between the individual benefits of sprawl against the collective benefits of intensification – and that somehow we needed to convince people to give up some of their personal benefit so that we can all benefit collectively. A pretty tough ask.
In more recent years I’m not so sure whether it’s a direct tension between individual and collective benefits. I actually think that individually, sprawled suburbia is eventually soul-destroying and as energy prices rise, individually unaffordable. I think that people may well feel better about their individual lives if they can walk to a dairy, park, bus stop, community centre and so forth and individually feel depressed about having long commutes, needing to drive absolutely everywhere and living in a street that looks exactly like the one next to you.
This seems to play out when you look at successful intensification projects often the house prices end up HIGHER than surrounding standard-sprawl suburbs. When given the options, it actually seems to me as though the benefits of inner-city living shine through – just look at house prices in Auckland to tell you that.
I think the answer to improving housing affordability in Auckland can somewhat be stated in two words: “Terraced Housing”, and lots of it.
Yer I live in a terraced house and can’t understand why there’s not more of it.
Interestingly, three level terraced housing at about 1:120 m2 densities are apparently one of the most cost-effective building types for developers to construct. Once you get beyond that level of density (5-6 floors) the cost-effectiveness falls away as you need to have elevator shafts, underground parking and so forth. It’s not until 9-10 floors that it starts becoming profitable once again.
So there seems to be this magic middle ground of 3 level terraced housing that we need to take serious advantage of.
I think part of the problem with terraced houses/apartments is that is many of the developments that have been done have cut big corners which has given them a bad reputation. Especially seeing as many are leaky. They also tend to be only living spaces and not give any regard to the rest of the environment around. As an example I used to live in an apartment at the top of Symonds St. It was a good apartment as it was large, had 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and 2 carparks (we used the other one for visitors), it was also mixed use which was good. The only thing I thought would have made a huge difference was if something had of been done about the wasted space on the roof. If the developer was smart he should have made the roof into a garden/courtyard area, this probably wouldn’t have cost much more but would have provided a great communal area to meet other residents, have a bbq etc.
Its the little things that make the difference and would have made the complex hugely more attractive and increased its value.
There’s quite a biggish block of this sort of thing from the 1970’s on the northern side of Wellington Street in Freemans Bay. Google map “sheridan lane, freemans bay” and zoom in.
I agree the leaky homes fiasco has certainly hurt confidence in the higher-density housing types – which is a bit of a pity. If I were a property developer I would be building tonnes of terraced houses – out of brick.
‘Walk up’ terraced buildings are are also very energy efficient, both in terms of the energy sunk into building them and the energy required to heat and cool them. I suppose in general efficient use of materials translates into both cost savings and energy/carbon savings.
Personally I just love the old style single story terraces around inner city Melbourne and Sydney, it is a shame they are so popular because I’ll probably never be able to afford one. Compact but functional layouts, small rear gardens with laneway access, great walkability to local services and excellent public transport nearby. It is kinda ironic that this hundred year old housing stock is the most consistent with modern sustainable planning and design (I guess it’s not too surprising when you realise they came from an era without cars or even electricity, they had to be space efficient and easy to heat and cool). With a little modern attention to insulation, water use etc I think the terrace of old is a great starting point for efficient modern urban housing.
I think in our part of the world there is very much the view that apartments and terraced house are only for students, renters and other marginal groups who are in a period of transition working towards their first ‘proper house’ (or for failures in life who never manage to get one). Higher density housing still lacks legitimacy, and it seems to be something of a self-reinforcing spiral: developers only build cheap crap for students and renters so few home buyers are attracted to the stock, which leads to the observation that people buying their own family home don’t like terraces and apartments. It’s obviously not the case everywhere, apartments of all shapes and sizes are common in Europe while one and two story historic terraces are among the most expensive properties to buy in Australia.
I guess the one critical difference is that a terrace or apartment block must necessarily be constructed by a developer and sold or rented as unit title, where as detached houses can be built by individuals to house themselves. All things being equal that is probably going to lead to better quality in the builder-owner-occupier sector of detached housing.
I’d love to see lots of terraced housing in Auckland, apart from using land far more efficiently, they would lend our suburbs a lot of character. Too many Auckland suburbs are incredibly boring.
Are the things you’ve drawn on the plan of central Manukau things you’d like to see? ‘Cause that extension of Osterly is already there and Karoro Ct (I had no idea this had a name!) is already pedestrian only. I agree with the basic premise of what you’re trying to achieve here – increased density and an urban form that creates an environment people want to be in, not drive through. But…there’s a fairly major problem with your plan. All of the land (approx) bounded by Karoro/Ronwood/Great South/Wiri Station is leased to Westfield. They have around 73 years (!!!) left on that lease. So there’s little public control of this land (either through District Plan or other measures).
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. MCC has a significant body of urban design work in the form of a Built Form and Spatial Structure Plan (for central Manukau) which looks at in detail the things your touching on in the later part of your post. There’s also plenty of specific work being done at the precinct level to maximise density around the rail station. Unfortunately none of this stuff is on their website.
Leaving the rail station and bus interchange, MIT development, and extension of Putney Way from the plan also underplays the importance that Putney Way will have as an east-west connector (in a people sense, not a vehicular one). There’s a pretty ambitious plan for central Manukau and the hope is that if the rest of the area develops to a high quality and more dense urban form Westfield will have to lift their game.
And one other minor thing, IMHO that public square you’ve shown is waaaaay too big, due to the sea of car parking and roads the scale of central Manukau can be deceptive!
This post by admin is exactly spot on and much of the solution in terms of urban form for AKLD is quite correctly the terrace house – in a way it combines the advantages of suburban housing i.e. ground floor access onto street, one vertical ownership title, garden albeit small out back etc – things from survey’s that show this is important to potential purchasers, and at the same times offers all the benefits of denser living. Interestingly, I have been designing terraced houses for a number of large scale master planned projects for a while now and the biggest hurdle remains convincing the developers to provide 1 car park only (especially 2 bedroom) – there is an overwhelming perception that it just won’t sell if you can’t get two-car garaging. Obviously other factors need to be taken into account here (i.e proximity to other amenities and PT) but we have managed to restrict car park provisions in some projects – these however have not yet reached the stage of making sales to Joe public, so it will be interesting to see if there is this perception.
“I actually think that individually, sprawled suburbia is eventually soul-destroying and as energy prices rise, individually unaffordable. I think that people may well feel better about their individual lives if they can walk to a dairy, park, bus stop, community centre and so forth and individually feel depressed about having long commutes, needing to drive absolutely everywhere and living in a street that looks exactly like the one next to you.”
spot on admin – save the big open spaces for holidays in the countryside, that’s if there’s any countryside left after th MUL have expanded.
Thanks for the comments R Lin… I only really make it out to Manukau when I get the theme park bug, so lots of what I did was from memory or the MCC website, google, etc…
“I only really make it out to Manukau when I get the theme park bug…”. I don’t blame you, there’s sod all else to attract you at the moment. Unless you have some masochistic need to shop at a crappy McMall. Rainbows End is sadly another “issue” with the urbanisation of central Manukau – their current lease extends till mid 2030… When you add to that the hight and land use restiction on the land between Cavendish and Ronwood due to the airport flight path, you’re not left with much developable land!
AdG, I was speaking with a developer of a high rise apartment building recently and he said their marketing research indidcated that only around 1/4 of buyers actually wanted a carpark at all (this is in central Melbourne). In the end they designed the building without any, allowing them more floors for apartments and full retail on the two street frontages (no vehicular access taking up half of one side). They made an arrangement with an existing parking operator to lease some parks nearby for those buyers that had to have them. Apparently the architect was tickled pink that they could get rid of a few floors of parking, and I guess the developer was too. I wonder what they actually profit from the most, a floor of parking or a floor of apartments?
Nick R – yes always good to hear these sorts of stories re apartments without/reduced carparks. I do think there are some lateral thinking developers out there in AKLD and the tide is definitely shifting. Once we get a few developments delivered on the ground as it were where car parking is either removed or limited that prove to sell well then this thinking will gain momentum. In my case however I am generally dealing with extensive areas masterplanned as whole suburbs where on the one hand the developer – understandably – is less likely to take some risks as it needs to appeal to a greater population base (unlike say an apartment block where as a “boutique” type statement you can get a away with it), however on the other hand the opportunity is that much greater (and exciting) in that if you do get some concessions to the minimum parking requirements you have the ability to better the environments of entire communities.
If you click on the Architect link I provided there, the Architect specialises in masterplanning developments in the UK that recreate medieval towns and villages, with alnost no provision for cars… Not my cup of tea but interesting nevertheless…
Nice, you should see if you can do the same thing with Albany, the most disgusting piece of land planning in Auckland IMO.
With the SH20 motorway opening soon I believe the plan is to downgrade Wiri Station Road to more of a local street.
Slowing the operating speed and adding more pedestrian crossings is a must. This will help connect Rainbows End to the main centre, and encourage people to use the new rail link to go to Rainbows end.
Also need to ensure Putney way is made much more attractive so the campus/station area can be linked well with the civic centre and mall. May have to give up a few of their beloved carparks to make it happen though.
You said “Now on an individual level, this is a very desirable place to spend your time and to live” about that sprawling suburb.
I’m really not sure if I actually agree with that. I mean, the places I have been to like that are good in some ways – you get a big garden, you ahve lovely trees around your property, you feel like you’re in the country. But they have major defects as well like
– you often have to drive to buy anything (even a loaf of bread) as there are so few people that the shops are really spread out
– you can’t walk around at night because the streets are dangerous since most are rural roads with cars moving at 80 km plus per hour
– there is hardly anybody on the streets (once again, due to low population density) so they don’t feel safe and, also, you have little sense of community
– there are very seldom pubs/bars/clubs/theatres in walking distance
I know a few young mums who’ve lived in places like this and, believe me, if you’ve got little kids it is bloody isolating to live on a lifestyle block.
I don’t agree with it myself, I love central city living but to many people it is very desirable and the list you have written are just the accepted side effects and are greatly outweighed by the positives, perceived or real…