Category: Housing & Development

Yesterday the government announced a major milestone in the very lengthy process to modernise New Zealand’s resource management system, with both the Spatial Planning Bill and the Natural and Built Environments Bill being introduced to parliament. A lot of Environment Minister David Parker’s press release focused on the cost and time savings that are hoped for as part of the reform, but there were also some interesting parts of what he said around the more fundamental shift in the new legislation – away from an ‘effects based’ system and more to an ‘outcomes based system’.…

The Auckland Council are currently consulting on the publicly notified changes to the Auckland Unitary Plan (AUP). The proposal follows a draft consultation on the changes the Council launched in April and are in response to the governments housing rules under the National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD) from 2020 and the Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS) from 2021.…

Most Saturdays we dig into the archives. This post by Peter was originally published in September 2014. It’s no secret that Auckland has a problem with high-cost housing. House prices have risen significantly faster than average incomes in recent years. As a recent Treasury working paper (Skidmore, 2014) documented, Auckland’s house prices have quadrupled in the last generation, and rents have more than doubled.…

The council’s proposed changes to the Unitary Plan, that are meant to give effect to the governments National Policy Statement on Urban Development and Medium Density Residential Standards, are currently out for formal submissions. We’ll talk about that more in a separate post shortly but last week Stats NZ released the building consent data for July so I thought it was a good time to review what’s been happening in that space in recent months.…

This post was originally published by Heidi in July 2019. (Credit for above image: Point and Miller) Promoting density is critical to avoid locking in sprawling, inefficient and climate-vulnerable modes of growth, but the kind of density matters. ‘Good density’ means functionally and socially mixed neighbourhoods with access to green spaces, comfortable, affordable, and climate-smart housing for all, and high-quality public transport networks.…

This post by Matt was originally published in July 2019 A recent Huffington Post article shines a light on a rather surprising political battleground in many cities around the world – seemingly progressive residents going feral against change in their neighbourhoods.…

Much is made about how our cities manage the growth of the housing stock by engaging in the process of “urban planning”, that this is performed by “urban planners”, and that the colourful maps which are the outcome of this process done by these people are “plans”.…