Guest Post: Your land, my rules

A guest post by a reader on Kiwiblog:

The Prime Minister wants a culture of ‘yes.’ A New Zealand that builds. An RMA replacement premised on the enjoyment of property rights. He has said so many times, in many rooms, and with great conviction.

Good on him. It is what would-be homeowners need, too.

But Auckland’s actual homeowners got upset about apartments. Then the Prime Minister discovered the word ‘impose.’

Kerre Woodham: Did the intensification announcement allay your fears?

We thought we'd start with the housing densification or de-densification that was announced yesterday. We didn't really get a chance to talk about it despite the fact that yesterday when the Prime Minister was in for an hour, he gave us a bit of an announcement of an announcement.

Kerre Woodham: The housing intensification battle reaches cabinet level

The battle over intensification of housing has reached cabinet level, with the Deputy Prime Minister and the Housing Minister at odds over Chris Bishop's plan to get hundreds of thousands of houses built in the super city.

“It's 2 million,” I hear you say. “They want to build two million houses.” Well, the Housing Minister addresses this in his column in this morning's Herald. There will be the ability for the council to consent two million homes. That doesn't mean they will all be built, as he says, the Auckland unitary plan enabled around a million homes. Ten years later, only around 10% of that enabled capacity has actually turned into new housing. The idea that a plan change that enables two million homes is suddenly going to result in two million homes being built in the short term is nuts, he says. Housing capacity does not immediately mean construction. It means the ability to do it, and it means infrastructure can be sequenced and coordinated to support it.

Kerre Woodham: I'm not convinced we can do housing intensification properly

Around 200 people packed out the Mt Eden Village Centre in Auckland last night, and they were pretty riled up. In fact, many were furious over plans for high rise apartments and the loss of special character status for hundreds of villas and bungalows in the wider neighbourhood. And this is the kind of feeling that is being felt across many different Auckland suburbs, and it will be coming to a city or town near you.