Auckland councillors set to vote on intensify housing in the city

7:49 am today

Photo: RNZ / Yiting Lin

Auckland councillors will decide on Tuesday how to intensify housing in the city.

The government has directed Auckland to have a minimum capacity of 1.4 million homes in the next decade, although it was not expected that many would be built.

There will be four options on the table at Tuesday's Policy and Planning Committee meeting , each with varying levels of intensification.

Auckland Councillor Richard Hills, committee chairman, told Morning Report ahead of the meeting one of the options - plan D - was the status quo.

"If we don't do anything, it will stay in place - that is intensification pretty broadly across the whole city, but it does focus on transport routes. You're talking 15 storeys across all the metro centres like Albany or Monaco, Henderson. You've got the bus corridors right across the city up-zone and you've got lots of MSU (Mixed Housing Urban Zone), which is a three-story zoning and MSU (Mixed Housing Suburban), but mostly MHU across nearly all suburbs.

"If you go to [plan] C it's kind of like a finer-grained version of that, so you've got more intensification around all the nodes but it starts to reduce where there isn't good public transport.

Richard Hills.

Photo: LDR/SUPPLIED

"You've got B, which is basically mostly focusing on the 10 kilometres towards the city centre, which is where the infrastructure is. So you've got all the frequent bus corridors at six stories, then you've got the rail stations close to the city, about 15km, and then they step back to 10 stories. But you have very little intensification.

"So B - the staff-recommended option - about 85 percent of Auckland's urban area is not changed from the unitary plan in 2016.

"And then A kind of strips away the bus routes and only has those higher zonings on the stations under the law, which include Maungawhau, Kingsland, Mount Albert, Baldwin and Morningside.

"And then all four include the zoning for hazards. So we've got strengthened zoning in areas that were really badly flooded, but also have susceptibility to landslides or flooding, you got down zoning right across there. So that was a big part of the plan, all the plan changes."

Hills said the impression he had was most councillors would go for option B, the "most sensible with the bus routes and the heights in there". Two councillors were pushing option A, he said.

Hills thought options A and B would likely be sent out to local boards for their input, ahead of further community consultation.

He was not sure about predictions of further house prices should more intense options, such as B, were chosen.

"What the difference will be for Aucklanders remains to be seen because this is a 30-year plan… Under all of those scenarios, only between 300,000 and 400,000 homes [will be] built over the next 30 years.

"So it doesn't necessarily change significantly, but it does start putting the houses… near those train stations [and] the City Rail Link, and a lot more focus around the bus corridors instead of potentially, instead of all the sprawl that we've seen in Auckland forever, which is far more expensive for all of us to continue to pay for the roads and the buses and the pipes all the way out on the edges of the city."

The council was not expected to deliver its final proposal to the government until June 2027, after consultation and an independent review panel.

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