I didn’t manage to get a “development update” post out last month, but I’ve now finished doing a pretty major update to the RCG Development Tracker page. Among other things, there’s been a new tranche of Special Housing Areas, a bit more info on things happening around Westgate, and I’ve updated a lot of apartment projects around the city (which ones have begun construction, expected completion dates, etc). Plus there’s been the usual array of new projects being announced.

The Tracker does actually cover the whole country, but taking a “Greater Auckland” perspective, there are currently 4,605 apartments or terraces under construction, with another 1,541 completed since 2012, and 2,694 currently selling off the plans but not yet being built.

On the Special Housing Areas front, since I don’t think we’ve mentioned it before, the council will now be focusing on getting brownfields SHAs approved in the remaining 13 months of the Housing Accord. In the first two years of the Accord, there’s been a massive amount of greenfields (i.e. urban fringe/ sprawl) land granted SHA status, which we’ve been quite critical of. It’s good to see that the focus, and hopefully the resources, will now be shifted to making development easier within the existing city. That’s the goal of the Auckland Plan, after all.

Also in positive SHA news, a recent Herald article announced who the developers would be at two Special Housing Areas which had already been announced. Ockham Residential will be developing the site at Avondale Racecourse, and Avanda Ltd will be tackling a large site on the edge of the New Lynn town centre, including the Monier brickworks factory.

In both cases, it now seems that the sites are going to get more homes built than previously thought. For Avondale, Ockham are planning 52 dwellings, up from the “at least 15” mentioned when the site was initially identified as an SHA. For New Lynn, the master plan aims to create 1,800 homes, up from 600.

Building Consents

July was a good month for consents, with growth across the board. The problem with looking at “moving annual” figures, which is what I usually focus on, is that each month you’re only changing one figure out of twelve – so changes in the trend can take a while to show up. That said, it seems like Auckland is starting to build more homes of all kinds – consent numbers are up for detached houses, apartments and other housing types.

In the last year (the year to July, at least, which is the latest data available), there were 8,567 dwellings consented in Auckland.

Auckland Dwelling Consents

We’re still not building enough homes, though. With three people per household in Auckland, we’re building enough homes for 25,000 people a year – but our population is growing by at least 40,000 people a year. This is not something that can be solved overnight, and we need to keep growing supply to provide adequate housing for the city.

Christchurch, in Cashel St I Wait

We haven’t talked much about Christchurch recently, but it’s an important part of this fair nation and we should all be keeping an eye on what’s happening there. Four and a half years on from the February 2011 earthquake, the Christchurch rebuild still has many years to run. The video below, posted by Cera last month, shows progress on some sites (including some of the government’s “anchor projects”) while much of the CBD is still vacant.

This video shows the progress at various anchor project sites such as the Innovation and Retail Precincts as at the end of July. There is significant development happening on the Avon River Precinct, the Innovation Precinct, and the Retail Precinct with several more anchor projects moving along. This footage also shows the huge changes on the Margaret Mahy Family Playground site, which is well under construction now and will be opening in December.

The “Retail Precinct” is actually a major office precinct as well, and is made up of several large developments by the private landowners. That includes Antony Gough’s The Terrace, which began construction in 2013 – the first of the big projects to do so – but then stalled until July this year. It’s now back in action. In the mean time, some other big projects nearby – the BNZ Centre, aka Cashel Square, and the ANZ Centre – are also under construction.

Then there’s the Bus Interchange which opened a few months ago, the Justice Precinct which is well underway, and a range of other things which you can explore in the Development Tracker map (or Cera’s Progress Map). However, there are still many sites which don’t seem to be making progress, and developments which were announced to great fanfare but have now stalled – this includes a Cathedral Square site which was to have been known as ASB House, but ASB has now pulled out.

The city continues to evolve and grow, and it’s good news to see things moving forward in the private-led Retail Precinct and the public sector ‘anchor projects’. On the other hand, it’s tough to look at the Cathedral Square area, and the Cathedral itself which you can see right into via a missing wall, and not be able to find many visible signs of rebuilding. As for the Cathedral, church leaders and the government have agreed to appoint a consultant who will review the situation, and a final decision on its future could be made by the end of the year.

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7 comments

  1. Well the growth in dwellings is all the more intensive types. New detached house numbers are relatively flat, but terraces and apartments have jumped from below 20% 2-3 years ago to firmly around 50% now.

    Auckland is growing up. Literally.

    1. Definitely true, most of the growth in the last couple of years has been apartments, terraces, retirement villages. Probably time to update the graphs I did last year showing our share of attached dwellings vs Australia.

      1. Th two words can be synonymous but I think the New Zealand use is that a flat is an attached dwelling with ground access, like sausage flats, and an apartment is in a multi level building with internal access.

    1. I try to steer clear of the word ‘flat’, since it’s not well defined – but I’d call a home an apartment if it’s in a building with units on top of each other, or units above shops etc. Essentially, dwellings that are vertically separated from each other. Although I guess even this could give odd results from time to time, e.g. a 2-storey villa where the bottom floor has been converted to a separate dwelling.

      If the dwellings are just next to each other, i.e. horizontally separated, I’d call those terraces or flats.

      But as Patrick suggests, it’s horses for courses really when you’re talking about lowish-rise, mediumish-density attached homes. There are a range of different typologies and they’re often known by different names in different parts of the world. Thanks to Goosoid, I now know that even ‘apartment’ has a different meaning in the US (cf condo).

  2. I would be happy to update you on the situation in the Christchurch CBD with some pictures if you are interested. It’s meant to be very warm over the week so taking evening pictures should be no problem.

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