Clarity on the Unitary Plan

Over the next week we’re going to try and focus a lot on the Unitary Plan – as the May 31st deadline for closing of submissions looms closer and closer. Given that the NZ Herald seems to have gone off the deep end in its complete misunderstanding of the planning system, while the Council doesn’t seem particularly effective at getting the message across, perhaps this focus can be constructive in looking at what’s worth supporting in the Unitary Plan and what should be amended to make the plan better. This posts picks up on a number of key points that we plan on making in our submission on the Unitary Plan: points that might be worth reiterating in your submission.

It is important to start by repeating that there are many good reasons to support the intent of the Draft Unitary Plan- the core purpose of it. In many ways the Unitary Plan will make perhaps the most important contribution to the Auckland Plan’s vision of making Auckland the world’s most liveable city – in the way it seeks to manage the tricky balance between making development easier (to ease affordability problems) but at the same time ensuring that development is good quality, in the right places and supported by necessary infrastructure. Critically, the Unitary Plan has taken the opportunity to not only bring together existing District and Regional Plans around Auckland, but also at the same time provide for a transformational shift in the future shape of Auckland in a way that supports the development strategy of the Auckland Plan. This bold approach is to be encouraged and must be maintained.

Key parts of the Unitary Plan we support include:

• Provision for ‘upzoning’ of land in a number of strategically important locations around Auckland. In particular, there appears to be good alignment between the zoning structure of the Unitary Plan and Auckland’s existing and future public transport network.
• The Unitary Plan includes robust assessment criteria to ensure that intensification is of a good quality. In particular the criteria relating to ensuring carparking does not dominate the streetscape are utterly essential in creating quality centres.
• The removal of minimum parking requirements in a number of zones gives effect to Directive 10.6 of the Auckland Plan and reflects growing international evidence that minimum parking requirements are perhaps the most critical planning rule that shapes urban form and transport outcomes.
• The removal of density controls in the Terraced Housing and Apartment Building zone, and the Mixed Use zone. Density controls undermine the ability to provide affordable housing by encouraging very large houses so developers can maximise their profit. Density often also has little to do with environmental outcomes as a single very large house can have greater effects than two or three much smaller houses.

Of course there are also a number of parts of the Unitary Plan that need improving. We’ll try to look at a number of these in detail over the next week but generally they are:

• In some locations it appears as though obvious opportunities for enabling intensification have been missed or the zoning is just illogical. We’ll try to pull together a reasonably comprehensive list of these but it’s worth scanning through the zoning maps to see whether anything “sticks out”. There’s a weird block of light industrial zoned land in the middle of Grafton, which seemingly obviously should be Mixed Use, for example.
• The urban land supply section of the Plan’s Regional Policy Statement needs to give clearer guidance in ensuring greenfield land is planned for appropriately and only released if absolutely required. There should also not be any ability to extend the rural urban boundary. While this might be overridden by the Auckland Housing Accord in the short term, in the longer term there’s likely to be a big risk of “hodge podge” sprawl randomly proposed in various parts of the new greenfield areas.
• There should be some variation in the future development potential of Metropolitan Centres based on their particular characteristics rather than blanket rules across all of these key centres.
• There should be the ability for some areas zoned Mixed Use to develop to a greater extent where the effects on surrounding communities would be minor and there is particularly good public transport access. Great North Road between Grey Lynn and town is a great example of this.
• The parking rules should be re-looked at quite extensively, including the removal of minimum parking requirements completely (particularly in the Mixed Housing zone).
• The Mixed Housing zone and Terraced Housing and Apartment Building (THAB) zone appear to be trying to do the job of three zones, with three-level fee-simple terraced housing (a typology with much potential in Auckland) being ‘squeezed out’. A third zone, specifically aimed at providing for that typology, is suggested. We’ll talk about this in more detail in a day or two.

Perhaps the one further thing yesterday’s Herald article highlighted is the need for the Unitary Plan to be clearer about what it does want and what it doesn’t want. It does seem weird that building anything in the THAB zone (which we obviously want to happen) requires the same level of consent as breaching a height limit (which we probably don’t want to happen 95% of the time).

Please add your suggestions for improvements, with reasons why in the comments and we’ll aim to generate a good crowd sourced submission.

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