Friends of the landlords – Wellington Councillors against affordable housing
This is a guest post by reader Frank McRae
Wellington’s housing crisis has dramatically worsened over the last few years with rapidly rising rents, record low listings, and lines down the street for flat viewings. Remarkably then Wellington City Council has just voted, against the advice of their own experts, to remove eight key Special Housing Areas which were setup to help ease the city’s housing shortage.…
123 Comments Guest Post: Co-Housing Part Three
This is a guest post by Biddy Livesey who is a housing policy analyst, researcher, and future resident of Cohaus.
Post Three – Planning for collective housing development: Consenting Cohaus
In this third post on cohousing, we consider how cohousing is supported through the Auckland Unitary Plan, and the specific planning challenge for innovative collective housing development in the inner suburbs of Auckland. …
Ch-Ch-Changes
Submissions to the Productivity Commission’s Low-emissions economy draft report close today June 8th, here. Arrrg.
There is a great deal that’s really good in the report, but one thing that I feel the Prodcom is missing is the changing nature of our cities, in particular Auckland.…
Hamilton: City of the Future
This post is about: How spillovers from the Auckland boom are driving growth in nearby regions.
The opportunities for these communities to benefit more from this economic change.
The central role of inter-regional transport infrastructure for reviving small towns and enabling their residents to take part in the bigger urban economies.…
New Zealand should plan for 10 million New Zealanders
Over the last few months I’ve been travelling all over New Zealand and parts of Australia for work. (This is part of the reason I haven’t found time to write blog posts!) I’ve been to Christchurch (twice), Wellington (twice), Hamilton (twice), Tauranga, Queenstown, and probably one or two other places.…
Sunday Reading 12 February 2017
Welcome back to Sunday reading.
From the Devonport Ferry. If your commute has tourists taking selfies on it then I’d say it’s probably pretty good:
Here is a clipping from yesterday’s Herald Commercial Property section. It neatly encapsulates the value of sorting out planning restrictions [Unitary Plan] and making high quality Transit investments [City Rail Link], naturally, given the context, through a property value lens: I wouldn’t get too hung up on the salesman’s boosterism in the second paragraph, as the main point is that the only way for tatty low value (in the broadest sense) parts of the city, like the current low rise commercial city fringe, to attract investment and therefore improvement is through value uplift.…
50 Years of waiting for an Auckland Rapid Transit system.
My father, Ian Reynolds 1922-2005, was an architect (as was my mother). He was also a what was then called a Town and Country Planner. After returning from working in England after the war he spent the rest of his career as partner in a big multidisciplinary practice in Auckland (missing the city of his youth: Wellington.…
City Centre Streets for the 21st Century
Santiago de Chile is home to some 6m+ souls, its origins date back to the 16th Century, and it has south American largest, and still expanding, Metro system. But, like almost all cities coming out of the 20th Century, its city centre streets have been allowed to be dominated by vehicles, with all of the disbenefits this brings.…
Unitary Plan reinforces need for focus on PT
The Unitary Plan is a crucial document for improving housing in Auckland, by enabling a lot more of it. As we’ve discussed, the Independent Hearing Panel’s (IHP) Recommended Unitary Plan enables almost double the “feasible” capacity from what the originally Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan (PAUP) did – from 213k dwellings to 422k dwellings.…
Sylvia Park growth plans
Sylvia Park is already Auckland’s largest shopping centre, but it’s likely to get even bigger in the next few years. Kiwi Property, who own the centre, have plans to expand the retail offering, as well as adding office buildings. In the long term, even things like apartments or hotels could be added, although those aren’t part of the current plans.…
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