Why stop at just a second CBD?

Last week mayoral candidate John Palino reaffirmed his position that we should turn Manukau into a second CBD. I have actually looked at some of the issues in the past but will look at a few different points this time.

Auckland mayoral candidate John Palino is promising to build a smart, green new city – possibly at Manukau – as an alternative to “sprawling intensification” proposed by Mayor Len Brown.

A second CBD is the most efficient and environmentally responsible approach to managing Auckland’s growth, says the right-leaning businessman and main rival to Mr Brown at October’s local body elections.

Mr Palino said concentrating new development on industrial land in Manukau or elsewhere serviced by rail or a busway would not only take the growth pressure away from suburban Auckland, but create a new city where people wanted to live.

He has criticised provisions in the new planning rulebook for the city – or Unitary Plan – to cram new residents into suburbs not designed for intensification. The plan may be notified on the eve of the elections and he has promised a review of it.

“The council’s top-down ‘my way or the highway’ approach to growth has killed off the excitement we all should be feeling about Auckland’s future,” Mr Palino said.

He said the way to fund a second CBD was through local government infrastructure bonds, which would be offered to New Zealanders first.

There are a couple of statements in there that just seem absurd. To start with, to refer to the unitary plan as sprawling intensification makes you wonder if he has even looked at the plan or if he is just listening to the shrills of residents in the likes of St Heliers and Milford. While the proposed mixed house zone covered ~49% of the urban area, the rules contained within it are similar to exists under current planning rules today. In fact John’s own house would only be possible within the mixed house zone. The proposed Terraced House and Apartment Building (THAB) zone where buildings were allowed to be four storeys or higher only covered ~7% of the urban area. That is hardly sprawling intensification.

The second is the suggestion that existing suburbs weren’t designed for intensification. How is it that the majority of suburbs in Auckland weren’t designed for intensification but somehow those surrounding Manukau were (because there is no way we could fit all growth into the industrial area of Manukau). It seems to me more just a position of putting the intensification in a place where he and the people he expects to vote for him won’t go and so won’t have to see. In other words a case of putting it in someone else’s backyard.

Lastly the comment of putting intensification of where people want to live is almost comical because I’m pretty sure that if we all had the choice, most people (not all) would love to live

• Near the water
• Near a town centre with good amenities and transport
• Near open space

Of course where people want to live is reflected very much in land values. The maps below show the residential and commercial land values per square metre in the city. It’s pretty clear that if you want to put intensification in a place where people want to live, that putting a lot more people in and around Manukau isn’t necessarily the best option. Of course the developing Manukau substantially would help change that picture a bit probably not substantially.

As a side note, you could probably plot the majority of support/opposition to the unitary plan by this map too, those areas in red (CBD excepted) being most opposed.

But what I really wanted to cover in this post was the idea of a second CBD. A CBD is effectively just the main concentration of commercial, retail and often residential activity that occurs in an urban area. It often occurs in roughly the geographical centre of a city but not always. Of course the same sorts of activities and densities could happen elsewhere in the urban area but normally don’t happen to the same size or scale as the main CBD.

One of the touted benefits of a secondary CBD is that they enable some key retail, services and employment of be located in closer to where people might live while also supporting higher densities in their own right. So if more than one CBD is a good idea then why just stop at two with Manukau? Why not three, four or even ten secondary CBDs? Surely we would want some these secondary centres all around the region close to major population catchments.

To enable these secondary centres to develop we could start by designating a small-medium sized area in which buildings are allowed to be higher than elsewhere across the region (with the exception of the main CBD). We could allow some of those buildings to contain apartments. We should ensure that the zoning allows for the construction of office buildings, shops or other similar developments. These centres should be easy to get around on foot and as Palino himself mentions, they need to be hooked up to the rest of the region by either a busway or a rail line. In the future if we need to expand these centres we could possibly do so by re-designating some the land around them.

To spread them out around the city we probably want a couple in the North, South, East and West. With a lot of growth likely to occur in the Northwest we probably want one there too.

This secondary CBD idea is starting to sound quite good, perhaps John is onto something that the current council haven’t thought of. But if there is perhaps one issue it is that the name. The term secondary CBD sounds a bit lame so we probably should come up with something a bit better. After thinking about it I came to the conclusion that the urban area of Auckland happens to be defined by the Metropolitan Urban Limit. Metropolitan sounds like a quite nice name so why not call these places Metropolitan Centres.

Brilliant so now we have a suggestion of a metropolitan centre which is a concentration of residential, retail, and employment and a number of them will be spread around the region. With such a potentially genius idea it’s amazing that the council’s planners didn’t even think about it…….

Oh wait they did. Here is the development strategy from the Auckland Plan where amongst a lot of other things, it says

Metropolitan centres, such as Takapuna and Manukau, will accommodate a large proportion of the city’s future residential, retail and employment growth. Generally these areas will serve a sub-regional catchment and be supported by efficient transport networks.

While the Urban Auckland section says

Metropolitan centres – these serve regional catchments or have strategic roles within the region. They provide a diverse range of shopping, business, cultural, entertainment and leisure activities, together with higher-density residential and mixed-use environments. They have good transport access and are served by high-frequency public transportation. These centres have the greatest opportunities for additional business and residential growth

The map below is the development strategy for the urban area

In short, what John Palino is suggesting is already happening as part of the Auckland Plan which is the high level strategy that the Unitary Plan is meant to enable. Further, rather than dive head first into spruiking Manukau as some kind of saviour location, perhaps we should focus on getting it the maximum out of it from even just what is proposed in the Unitary Plan. The map below shows the extend of the Metropolitan Centre zoning that was proposed and you can see just how much of it is current being used for carparking or other low rise activityies (for example the area north of Ronwood Ave all currently has a maximum height of about two storeys). If there is actually demand for the area to develop then it will happen on its own.

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