The New North Road corridor

Yesterday’s post about promoting the section of Great North Road between Grey Lynn and Karangahape Road as a high priority area for intensification generated a lot of interesting comments. It would seem that generally there was a lot of support for the idea, although with some justified mention that the impact of more people on existing schools in the area needs to be taken into consideration. This is fairly obvious, and I would suggest that it’s probably a lot more cost-effective for the Ministry of Education to add buildings to existing schools in these inner suburbs than it is for them to acquire land and build brand new schools in areas on the urban periphery like Flat Bush.

Another corridor which seems as though it could be suitable for a similar type of redevelopment (and also where such development is starting to happen) is along the inner portion of New North Road, between Kingsland and Newton: Much like the Great North Road corridor, which is located just across the other side of the Northwest Motorway, this corridor runs through an area with fairly high land values and pretty good public transport. Aside from a few places along the route (particularly up near Symonds Street) there’s not too many heritage constraints on the corridor either, as long as we’re sensitive about how development interacts with adjacent residential areas. So in terms of viability and attractiveness, it seems logical to assume that intensification would “work” here. The approximate location of both corridors I’ve looked at so far in comparison to land-values around Auckland is shown below: The two black lines show the roads we’re talking about intensifying along – which generally site within the orange areas showing fairly high land values (and therefore the incentive to make the most out of the high land values).

A fairly typical street scene from this area is shown below – not altogether dissimilar to what we have just over on the other side of the valley along Great North Road: Plus of course we also have the infamous interchange with Dominion Road which is crying out for something to happen to it (as described in more detail here): Tightening up this interchange into a normal intersection would free up an enormous amount of land, plus reintegrate Kingsland with Eden Terrace and create a much nicer urban environment around here.

We have started to see a few apartment developments occurring along New North Road over the past few years – the one below is on the site of an old petrol station that closed down around five years ago: Looking closely at the sign shows that the two bedroom apartments were selling for around $410,000 – what you might expect for such a development to stack up financially. We’re not talking shoebox apartments here either I imagine. This development has 40 units on around 1,200 square metres – only 30 square metres of land per unit.

And once again, you can see that this development forms only a small proportion of what I might call the general intensification area – although perhaps to a greater extend than along Great North Road many opportunities here have already been taken up (especially close to town):

 The Dominion Road/New North Road intersection could become quite a hub for development around this part of Auckland if it was turned back into something more normal. The Newton Station will also, once the City Rail Link is built, be a huge hub for development.

Share this