Welcome back to Sunday reading. This week is the week that the Independent Hearings Panel released its recommendations on the Auckland Unitary Plan, so we’re going to lead off with a few reactions.

First, Hayden Donnell at the Spinoff had a useful summary of the IHP’s decisions. Essentially, the recommendation is to go both up and out, but they’ve pushed a bit harder on up. This is, as they observe, a firm refutation of the idea that Auckland doesn’t need to do more to enable housing:

Recomended UP - Distribution of Capacity

The original council plan only allowed for 39% of new development inside existing urban areas. The IHP’s plan ups that figure to 64%, even while expanding the amount of land available for development by 30%. That means a more compact city focused around public transport hubs; one where future Aucklanders have a chance to avoid uncontrollably weeping their way through four hour commutes from the Kaipara Harbour every morning.

It’s both a step along the road to creating a city that young people can still live in and a surgical critique of every nostalgic anti-density Boomer that’s eked out a whinging submission to council. Freed of the shackles of groaning ratepayer groups, the IHP did what it thought was right for Auckland – and it mainly sided with the Generation Zeros of the world.

The Spinoff is also running a special section covering the Unitary Plan and advocating for it to be passed.

Economist Shamubeel Eaqub also provides a positive review (on Radio NZ):

The recommended plan for Auckland’s future land use planning is bold, visionary and pragmatic. I love it, so should the champions for Auckland and fairness in society.

A group of independent commissioners have done what the Auckland Council could not. They have planned for over 400,000 new homes by 2041 – the amount likely to be needed. The previous plans had been grossly inadequate, hampered and stymied by local and special interest groups.

This will remove the constraints to housing supply that have disproportionately affected the poor, vulnerable, young and renters. There have been obvious impacts on housing affordability, but also (over) crowding, increased stresses for social and emergency housing providers and homelessness.

Housing supply isn’t a magic cure for these ills, but it is a critical part of it.

Green Party MP Julie Anne Genter puts the issue in slightly broader perspective, looking at the impacts on housing affordability, climate change, inequality, and happiness:

Four – Happiness
The Happy City sums up all the latest research on health and happiness outcomes of cities. What could people want more than health and happiness? It turns out cities can be engines of happiness – but only if we design them for people (not cars).

Again, although it seems boring, part of the answer to achieving this change is getting the rules in the Unitary Plan right.

You don’t need to understand all the implications of the detailed recommendations from the Hearings Panel on the Unitary Plan. But if you want a happy, healthy, fair, affordable and green future for Auckland, let your local body politicians know that the recommendations are going in the right direction.

Others are not so happy. Alleged journalist Bernard Orsman (NZ Herald) has been doing his usual work, going around wealthy suburbs looking for ill-informed reactions. A selection:

Orsman Unitary Plan stories

Reading his coverage, I get the impression that he doesn’t actually understand how zoning works. He seems to think that rezoning to allow higher-density development *automatically* means that the bulldozers roll in. I also think the viewpoints he’s highlighting are seriously out of touch in a city where housing unaffordability touches the lives of most low-income people and most young people.

Speaking of, Toby Morris (Pencilsword) has put together an illustrated rant on Auckland’s housing affordability:

Pencilsword_rent_rage_02

A final point of view: At Interest.co.nz, urban planner Matthew Paetz makes some technical critiques of the residential development controls in the Unitary Plan, and how the fine details of some rules may make it challenging to implement the plan’s aims:

…the first thing I looked for were density rules, and controls on height, outlook and private open space. It is essential to look at all of these rules holistically, as they interrelate. If one rule is liberal but the other is highly restrictive, then the overall impact on development feasibility and ultimately housing supply may be restrictive. Density rules control the intensity of development, and are usually measured in terms of residential units per area unit of land. For example, a density control of 1 unit per 300 square metres of site area would allow two houses to be built on a site of more than 600 square metres, but not on a site of less than 600 square metres.

My first surprise in reading the PAUP recommendations was that density rules had been done away with. Not that I disagree with this. Density rules can be inflexible and can place a barrier on the delivery of a greater number of smaller units which generally have similar impact as a smaller number of larger houses.

I think the Panel is right to focus on controlling externalities, by way of other development rules which moderate impacts on neighbours – such as shading controls. The variances in rules, such as height and building coverage, between different zones will by default lead to variance in densities between the zones, without applying a density rule.

The problem with the 6 metre outlook space rule

But given this apparent focus on externalities, I was rather surprised with the retention of the six metre Outlook Space rule. I was surprised this was retained, because although well intentioned, it will pose a significant potential barrier to feasible medium density site redevelopment and therefore housing supply…

On a similar note, Anton Babadjanov (The Urbanist) asks whether natural light in buildings is “NIMBY rhetoric or a livability staple?” It’s a fine compilation of the evidence on light, health, and affordability impacts:

So, tower spacing can reduce the amount of housing/office space that can be built by as much as 1/3, significantly affecting affordability in the long run and displacing thousands of people from an area close to jobs. Yet, access to natural light in buildings is crucial for a culture of people who spend 87% of their time indoors. It affects their cognitive performance, psychological well-being and even physiological health.

There are really only two tools at our disposal to solve this problem:

  • Zone more land for dense redevelopment.
  • Add tower spacing, but only with increased height and FAR limits to ensure that the same amount of housing or office space can be built after the new rules go into effect (e.g. allowing 600-foot towers in a formerly 400-foot zone).

While option two tries to minimize the supply decrease resulting from tower spacing it probably can’t do so perfectly. There is no free lunch, after all. But the point here is that, when implemented with an upzone, the improved human outcomes of tower spacing outweigh the decreased outcomes of the minimized displacement likely to occur.

DC metro and bike share

On a completely different note, two articles on immigration and fast food. First, Alicia Wittmeyer (Foreign Policy) explores “Britain’s extra-crispy class war” – and the immigrant origins of stereotypically British foods like fish and chips:

Fried chicken in Britain — in addition to being a reliable sponge for alcohol — is mainly poor and working-class people’s food. Many of those who consume it come from immigrant communities. (The shops often prominently advertise themselves as halal.) It is hard not to conclude that these associations with class and race have shaped the way the meal is perceived in Britain — at least by the middle-class observers frowning on poorer people’s lifestyle choices.

There is, however, hope for redemption — a chance that the meal might yet evolve from fraught symbol to humble supper. After all, before there was chicken, there was fish…

Long before fish and chips was Britain-on-a-plate, it was ethnic food — Jewish food, to be specific, with all the stigma that entailed. Middle-class Brits turned up their noses at the smell, Panayi writes, which they associated with inner-city ghettos and vicious anti-Semitic stereotypes. References to “hook nosed Jew[s]” and Jewesses working as “dealer[s] in fried fish” litter the pages of 19th-century newspapers…

What finally convinced middle-class Brits of the virtues of their dish was the arrival of competition. It was the Chinese and Indian takeaways of the 1960s and 1970s that elevated chippies from symbols of the slums to British icon. Britons faced with “ethnic” food wanted a speedy, cheap meal that was “theirs.”

Second, Eleanor Ainge Roy (Stuff) profiles Rotorua baker Patrick Lam, the five-time winner of the Supreme Pie Award, showing how an iconic New Zealand snack has diversified:

Patrick Lam, the baker behind Patrick’s Gold Star Bakery in Tauranga, last night took out his fifth Supreme Pie Award since 2003. He has won 56 other awards in the competition. We spoke to Patrick in 2012 about how he went from nine years in a Vietnamese camp to master pie maker.   

patrick lam supreme pie

“Because a Cambodian was winning, it lifted everybody’s game, ” says Kevin Marshall, one of the event organisers. Eighty per cent of the bakers who take part in the competition are Asian, and 50 per cent of the winners are Asian too. Marshall says New Zealand has a “multicultural baking society”, and thinks the influx of Asian bakers has been good for pies and the overall competition. “When Patrick won in 2003 he gave a lot of the other Asian bakers confidence to take part and since then they have dominated the competition. He puts so much effort into his flavours and seasonings and is always working to come up with something new and creative. Pies are not a junk food – they are an art.”

Lam thinks bakeries have become popular with Asian migrants in the last 10 years because there are few employment options for people with limited English skills, and bakeries often function well as a family business. Three members of Lam’s extended family run bakeries in New Zealand, and have won top awards in the Bakels competition.

When Lam moved to New Zealand in 1997, he had no experience in bakeries – in fact he would hardly ever cook. He had been working in a juice factory in Cabramatta, Sydney, for the previous decade, and almost on a whim decided to set up a lunch bar. He was getting on, and knew if he didn’t take a chance on something soon his life would slip by. There is a strong streak of daring in Patrick Lam, which makes him talk of his achievements – and the risks he took – lightly…

Lam is continually experimenting with new flavours, trying his concoctions on his staff and occasionally special customers. At night he and his family usually eat Chinese or Cambodian food, though he eats a pie every day at morning tea with his staff. Although he was 27 before he tasted a New Zealand pie, they have become the greatest passion of his working life.

“The first time we won I didn’t believe it, ” he says, grinning at the memory.

“We are part of Asian people and how can you win other people’s tradition? But we are proud of ourselves and winning just makes you want to try even harder. But I think I have to work harder because I came from nothing, I came from zero dollars. I think only in New Zealand could you achieve this.”

I’ve tried to sample Patrick’s pies several times while passing through Rotorua – no luck, as they always sell out too early in the day!

To close on a separate note – transport for a change! – Vox author Matt Yglesias explains why “transit of the future needs smarter routes, not more gadgets”:

Technology is changing the commuting experience across the board, and politicians looking to present a forward-thinking image are trying to embrace it. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York City Transit Authority, for example, are eagerly touting a soon-to-arrive new bus fleet that will feature “enhanced amenities like USB charging ports and Wi-Fi.”

But a recent nationally representative survey of transit riders from TransitCenter, a New York–based foundation focused on improving urban mobility, indicates that high-tech gimmicks are a very low priority for the people who actually use mass transit.

The future of successful, high-ridership systems may or may not involve USB ports but will definitely include reworked routes that provide reasonably fast and frequent service close to where many people live.

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25 comments

  1. Great to see the plan creep forward. Does anybody have any feel for whether it will achieve 140k of new homes? The central point is the anti-Nimby problem that infill Iggggg is easy but consolidation of say 65 m of frontage at least to put up a space efficient terrace is not. Ideally for appearance reasons you might prefer to see s whole block. Hard to see this happening

    Haphazard is likely to be slow and ugly at a guess?

    1. I think a lot of those terraces in Europe weren’t built in one go either. On street level you can see that although the houses are built in a similar style, they are not the same. There’s different materials and colours, some houses have more storeys than others, and you can tell from the windows that the stud height varies as well.

      You can convert one lot at a time to terraced housing — on a frontage of 15 metres you can build 2 or 3 terraces. A less awkward looking alternative for a single lot is splitting the lot in half and building a pair of semi-detached houses. Or building a low-rise apartment. There are so many possibilities if we don’t outlaw them.

  2. Wifi is a gimmick in the 2degrees era of cheap mobile data. Usb charging however will be a godsend on many occasions.

    Agree this is all secondary to frequency and coverage, but how much extra frequncy would the savings from no USB ports get us ? Diddly i would imagine.

  3. On a related note to the UP, self-driving cars and taxi-buses – along the lines of what Elon Musk of Tesla, SpaceX and Tesla Energy storage fame] talked about earlier this week.

    The International Transport Forum [ITF], just published This study examining the potential outcomes of a radical change in urban mobility configuration that would result from the implementation of a shared and fully autonomous vehicle fleet”.

    Its interesting and based on modelling a real-life city [Lisbon Portugal] – the executive summary and policy implications on Page 5 and 6 are interesting and also very sobering reading for those who think this nirvana will simply waltz in the door and solve all our problems – if you don’t have time to read the study , just read those 2 pages.

    While the headline that such a change would produce dramatic reductions in traffic congestion resulting in up to 90% fewer cars on the road.

    The big issue is as always, how do we get there from here – and it also raises lots of fish hooks and policy choices that need to be made along the way.

    The basic thing is that until a majority [like 65%] of the vehicles on the road are either shared use or autonomous buses – congestion won’t improve, and and as the two systems complete congestion will get a lot worse in the meantime.

    The relevance to the UP is that no matter what people say they want, the reality is, as the UP shows for Auckland is that we all have to “scrunch up a little” to make enough room.
    This also means that not only do we need more compact housing options, but we also need to stop driving around in our “quarter acre, detached house” [aka the SOV], and start using the limited road space more wisely with sharing of the road space and ur vehicles. So we need to adopt the the “Mixed Use Suburban”/”Mixed Use Urban” and “Townhouse and Apartment Block” self-driving options that this study looked at.

    Or the future Auckland will not turn out how the IHP thought it should, and all that work will be wasted.

  4. Can’t imagine life without the food diversity. It isn’t a real city unless you can get a great curry.

  5. The shading rules should be directional, north sun should not be shaded, where south doesnt really mattered.

    At the moment they all have the same restrictions so some unneeded spacing is required and density protential is lowered.

  6. Thanks for mentioning my piece Peter, and I appreciated those other links too.
    I do think there are a lot of really strong elements to the Plan, but little things like this do frustrate me a bit!
    I may seem picky, but notwithstanding the excellent overall intent and direction, getting little details optimal is really important.
    Kelvin is right too – the combination of the outlook space rule and the shading rules will be an awful lot of wasted space.
    The IHP have obviously been trying really hard to balance enabling development capacity with maintenance of amenity values. I just think they have emphasised the latter just a BIT too much at the expense of the former.
    But ‘just a bit’ can be quite significant. Every metre matters with density!
    Matt P

    1. Volcanic View Shafts too; It’s frankly nuts that the land around Panmure Station, for example, is limited to 8m.

      I don’t agree that always being able to see the Maunga enhances the city; if we re-evaluated them and kept a proportion of them, allowing some places to build up and conceal them from some angles then the experience of them would become more dynamic and varied. We would appreciate them more. There’s no theatre to these lumps above a squat city.

      1. In many ways I sometimes prefer the old Common Law regarding nuisance.

        “As to any right of prospect, a building erected so as to spoil a view cannot at common law be a nuisance for that reason. I know no general rule of common law, which warrants that, or says, that building so as to stop another’s prospect is a nuisance. Was that the case, there could be no great towns; and I must grant injunctions to all the new buildings in this town” – Lord Hardwicke LC Attorney-General -v- Doughty (1752)

        1. Yes. Any time someone tries to argue zoning restrictions of neighbours are “property rights” ask them what common law precedent they have in mind. Certainly doesn’t extend to views (even though Rodney Hide was trying to argue exactly that the other day).

        2. Hide is like the rest of ACT; so completely confused when libertarian conclusions contradict conventional power positions, they can’t square that circle so end up tying themselves into contradictory knots by supporting the crony policy and trying to make it match the ideology: The result is a Hot Mess.

        3. Agreed. A whole lot of fair weather libertarians / right wing liberals have certainly been caught out by this issue.

        4. I have had many a fight with Seymour on this issue, I said to him you can’t be a classical liberal and support zoning controls. He wasn’t to happy with that, if he was a true classical liberal he would would have posted a “It’s Happening” Ron Paul gif in response to less zoning controls.

        5. There’s a huge amount of hypocrisy in the libertarian camp!!!!
          Overall, I’m not a libertarian at all, but I am close to a ‘Planning libertarian’, ie. I think there should be much more freedom to develop both urban and rural land (To prove I’m not a libertarian overall – I believe there needs to be a lot more social housing! not all of us are easily pigeon holed!)

          Many libertarians in the USA in the planning space have argued this position. But here in NZ, libertarians often seem to conveniently flag away the notion of being able to do more with urban land – it’s fine if it happens ‘out there’ in the countryside.
          A position I’ve heard recently from some libertarian quarters is that intensification imposes a whole lot of things on urban communities and destroys character. But somehow, the fact that greenfield development (in areas with lifestyle properties) will also peeve off plenty of people and affect amenity amenity is conveniently ignored!

          I’m very much of the view that planning should impose minimum bottom lines, but that it almost always goes too far (eg. outlook space rule).
          Likes Harriet says bring it back to common nuisance type things. I’m all for rules that provide ‘reasonable’ sunlight /daylight access, for example.

          Yes Seymour’s position comes across as really hypocritical/confused. The simple reality is, a ‘true’ libertarian’s view of zoning wouldn’t go down well in the Epsom electorate, and we all know that principles can fly out the door fairly easily in the name of politics…

    2. Hi Matt P,

      Good write up. I agree that the outlook space rules are unnessecarily restrictive. I was wondering that for your typical 16 by 43 section though, that it would be more likely to have the houses in a row down the section. If you did that, you could make your houses 7m wide allowing for 3m one side and six the other. You have 43-6=37m to play with on the other dimension. So you would end up with 37×7= 259m2 building on a 688m2 section. Which is pretty darn close to you max building coverage anyway. At 2 storeys you could have 4no. 130m2 houses or 5no. 100m2 houses.

      You could also make the ground floor wider if the main living area was in the upper storey.

    3. I don’t know if this is the right part of the forum for getting into the nitty gritty of the RAUP but here goes anyway…

      Has there been any discussion amongst you guys that are donkey deep in it about Table H13.6.2.1 Height in relation to boundary?

      I think the table is only supposed to be for situations where you’ve got a Biz Mixed-Use next to lower-density sites but the 5th line shows 8m + 60° against another site zoned Biz Mixed-Use. Is that a mistake?

      Generally, I think the RAUP is pretty good effort. One aspect that I thought was strange was required parking minimum (1/30m2) in Metropolitan Centres for all retail. Might have been better to treat Metro Centre same as City Centre in this regard? All those main street coffee shops are not going to be able to provide any parking.

        1. Do the parking minimums require people to be able to park though, can you build the spots then just put tables on them?

  7. Back in the real world, why in 2016 does AT think it is acceptable to have up to a 72 hour delay in processing on line HOP card payments? What do they use for this? Hedgehogs with saddlebags? I almost missed the last bus home last night because despite having topped up online on Thursday evening my HOP card still did not have credit. Unacceptable.

  8. There are many poorly built houses in Auckland. Small, no sunshine (I was in one today), views only of a fence, no garden.
    These houses would be better demolished for townhouses or apartments.

  9. As far as I can tell no minimum private open space rules in City Centre zone and Mixed Use zones?
    I like this. In the Queenstown PDP we avoided mandatory minimums. Leave it to the market. Juliet balconies can work well.
    In the right locations (coast etc) market will usually demand balconies anyway.

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