Development Update: April 2017
Industrial is important
In more than two years of Development Update posts, I’ve hardly ever mentioned industrial development. It’s hard to show in a map like the RCG Development Tracker, so I don’t cover it there.
But even in a modern economy like Auckland, with a strong services base, industrial properties are important.…
12 Comments Development update: March 2017
I wrote in December that “2016 has been a big year for development” – now that we’re a little bit past the end of the year, it’s actually possible to see how big it was. Still, as the cheese ads say, good things take time.…
Development update: January 2017
2017 will be the Year of the Terrace.
Terraced homes, built in rows: neighbours on either side, but not or above or below. They’re relatively cheap to build, and they’re within the reach of many small/ medium-sized building firms, ones which have traditionally concentrated on detached houses.…
Development update: December 2016
2016 has been a big year for development, and by “development” I mean the process of getting new homes built, or any other new buildings for that matter.
In the last “development update” post for the year, I wanted to look back at some of the highlights which you might have missed.…
Australian city centres: a good-news story
Last week I was in Brisbane for work. There seem to be quite a few cranes around the city, including midrise apartment developments creeping along the riverfront to the west of the city centre. The Brisbane CBD proper is still quite sterile at night after all the office workers have left – it’s an absolute pain in the neck to try and find dinner.…
Farnham Street residents looking at each other down the barrel of a gun
Caution: this post contains references to John Farnham.
I was updating the Development Tracker recently, and added another one to the list – 9 Farnham Street. It hasn’t made it off the starting blocks yet, despite a couple of attempts.
In 2008, and perhaps for some time before that, 9 Farnham Street was being advertised for a five-storey building, with three floors of office and two penthouse apartments:
The sign was still up in 2009, but sometime after that it was taken down.…
Porte Cochere 2 – Pedestrians 0
While looking at Auckland Transport’s website I found they’d uploaded a number of plans relating to the City Rail Link (the same place I saw the K Rd image from this morning’s post). One of the documents showed the plans for Albert St after the CRL has been completed.…
Nibbling at the edges of Auckland
Recently Google updated their satellite images for some large parts of Auckland – generally the urban area greater than about 10km from the city centre. Based on some of the detail in the images my guess is they’re from about May this year.…
Development update: August 2016
If you’re not one of the avid followers of the RCG Development Tracker – “Trackies”, as they like to be known* – you might have missed a few tweaks I made last month.
The Tracker does a good job of showing discrete, one-off projects, but it’s a little harder to represent major long-term developments.…
Slicing the housing cake: Developer profits versus capital gains
Who benefits from enabling housing development? And who bears the costs of restricting it?
One common refrain is that reducing regulations to enable housing will deliver higher profits to developers, while disadvantaging existing homeowners, who must contend with more people living in the neighbourhood. …
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