Phil McDermott: Back to Basics: Planning, Housing Markets, and the Cost of Ignoring Economics

Acknowledging the impact of planning on housing

At last, economists, commentators and the media in New Zealand are recognising what has been evident in many countries since late in the 20^th century; that plans to contain city growth in urban boundaries betray the hopes of large and growing numbers of urban dwellers and job seekers.

In Auckland, an independent panel has modified the proposed Unitary Plan to allow more dwellings.  But it is too little, too late; so Auckland remains consigned to increasing social division fashioned around a new poverty, a poverty rooted in the failure of the housing market.

Frank Newman: Revitalising the CBD

Central Business Districts (CBDs) are facing the challenges of change. People are changing the way they go about their lives and in particular how they spend their money. Many CBD’s are struggling to remain relevant against competition from big box retailers and as offices move to the cloud.  As a result the CBD is evolving as a place for small footprint boutique retailers, cafes, bars, restaurants and inner city apartment living.  That evolution is taking some time (decades) to work through but some provincial towns are taking the initiative by taking action now.

One I visited recently had just removed parking meters from its CBD. They have made parking free, with a three hour time limit.

Michael Coote: Submission on the Auckland Unitary Plan

May 2013

Draft Auckland Unitary Plan Feedback from an Auckland Ratepayer and Resident

To whom it may concern,

I write concerning the Draft Auckland Unitary Plan (“D-AUP”) as it relates to policy concerning Maori and Mana Whenua [The people of the land who have mana or customary authority – their historical, cultural and genealogical heritage are attached to the land and sea].

Frank Newman: RMA a failure

The Resource management Act is about to get another makeover, the 21^st since the legislation became law in 1991. The new changes are to be announced within the new few weeks and expected to take up to three years to put into effect. Twenty-one changes in 22 years is a clear admission that the Act is not working, and never has.

Phil McDermott: The Unravelling of the Auckland Plan

Getting the housing equation wrong
The failure of the Auckland Plan to reflect the simple aspirations of Aucklanders for home ownership and predominantly low-rise suburban lifestyles and promote instead the lofty compact city vision held by its planners and policy-makers made its unravelling inevitable.  And now it’s started. Rationing land to squeeze the city upward was always going to create problems.

Bryan Leyland: Auckland will be liveable only if it is affordable

The Auckland plan ignores the potential for modern technology to solve our transport and other problems and, instead, pushes expensive and inappropriate 19th and 20th century solutions. They plan to spend about $3 billion on a rail tunnel that, like all tunneling projects will cost much more and will demand huge subsidies for every passenger. The tunnel is needed only because the plan decrees that people and employment must be crowded into the city centre.

Phil McDermott: Upping the Ante - Where can we Afford to Live?

Auckland fiddles, Sydney makes its move

The Auckland Council has released a Housing Action Plan that will be an addendum to its encyclopaedic Draft Unitary Plan.  It contains seven objectives, 12 priority areas, and 32 actions.  The Housing Action Plan will now be subject to the submissions and appeal process  associated with the Unitary Plan, whatever form it takes, and presumably also subject to the red tape associated with trying to implement it.

Phil McDermott: Out Might Just be Better than Up - the Housing Density Debate is Not Over

The fall-back position - let's not be LA

New Minister of Housing Dr Nick Smith is determined to “smash the city limits”, so that Auckland grows out, as well as up.  The Mayor of Auckland responded with the claim that allowing the city to expand outward is tantamount to advocating a “flawed Los Angeles model of suburban sprawl and unbridled land availability", and that it would be a throwback to the 1940s and 1950s.

Karl du Fresne: Council bureaucracy frustration

Everyone I know seems to have a story about the frustrations of dealing with council bureaucracies. Try to build a simple garage to keep your car out of the weather, and you’re bombarded with engineering requirements more appropriate to the construction of a nuclear reactor.

Apply for consent to build a standard house – which these days requires submitting hundreds of pages of documents – and you can expect to wait the full 20 working days allowed before getting a response, only then to be told that you’ve overlooked some minor technical detail and will have to put your builder off until it’s been rectified.

Phil McDermott: Congestion, Density, and Transit– Have we got the mix all wrong?

The compact city/transit answer to the urban sustainability question

Expensive – and usually loss-making – public transit is enjoying a resurgence in the face of uncertainty over the supply and price of oil, concerns about the proliferation of private vehicles and greenhouse gas emissions, and  questions over the sustainability of our cities.

Phil McDermott: Redesigning a City - Planning an Affordable Future for Auckland

At last some urgency ... The Government has responded to the analysis of housing affordability by largely adopting the multifaceted approach proposed by the New Zealand Productivity Commission.

My interest is in what it says about boosting the supply of houses, a necessary but not sufficient condition to improve affordability and sustain the liveability of our two largest cities.  The government response acknowledges the urgent need to boost dwelling numbers in Auckland and Christchurch, and to do so by providing for sufficient brownfield and greenfield land accessible to the market in a regulatory environment that no longer unduly impedes development. 

Phil McDermott: The Answer Is Urban Consolidation – What Was The Question?

Perpetuating the Myth

The Green Party is perpetuating the claim that development beyond Auckland’s “city limits” imposes a high cost on ratepayers.  A spokesperson claims that the current Auckland plan which allows for some new development outside the current urban area, “will cost ratepayers $42b billion to 2042, an annual levy of $200 per ratepayer”  according to a report in the New Zealand Herald.   

But is just so happens that  study on which these calculations are based is a flawed commissioned report rather than a peer reviewed academic study.[1] 

Frank Newman: Environmental activism

When the Resource Management Act (RMA) was first introduced it was with the expectation that it would empower communities. It has done the opposite. It’s evolved into a web of rules and regulations created by environmental activists to advance their preservationist views. The effect has been to increase land prices and stifle economic growth and social wellbeing in the provinces. Rural folk are not happy, and are saying so in greater numbers.

The question I ask is how is it that an “enabling” piece of legislation like the RMA has grow into what it is today?

Sandra Goudie: Rural Property Lockdown

Already Regional Councils require farm plans to some degree, activities became discretionary for any property identified as being a “significant natural area” (SNA), and fencing is becoming increasingly compulsory, and at least in one case a discretionary activity.

Practically any remnant of bush can be classified as an SNA on the basis of maintaining a corridor. People have had their lives turned upside down as they battle to understand what is happening while at the same time trying to defend their love of the land and ethic of stewardship.

Phil McDermott: From Connection to Dispersal - urbanisation in the 21st Century

Trade, transport and city growth: Commentators have long studied connections between cities and how these influence their development.  The city is the natural focus of trade-based theories of growth.  Exporting a surplus, based on local resources and specialisation was – and is – considered the way  to city wealth.

In this world, transport is the key to the trade portal.  The cities that dominated world trade in the 19^th and 20^th centuries were those best connected, initially through their ports and sea links complemented later through strong ties over the airways.  Mega-ports and airport hubs were  marks of city success.

This blog raises the possibility that this model is changing, and we need to change our thinking about the future  of our cities with it.

Richard Epstein: City Planners Run Amok

The Upper West Side (UWS) of New York City operates in a moral and political universe different from my own. Currently, its confident progressive worldview has precipitated a major land use controversy. On the urging of the UWS “community” and its elected officials, the City’s Department of Planning has endorsed this modest proposal “for new or expanding establishments” on Broadway, Columbus, and Amsterdam avenues. These are major commercial streets, yet the proposal seeks to limit store frontage on them to forty feet for general retail and twenty-five feet for banks.

The proposal earns its “modest” label, because, as the Planning Department confidently notes, the rule would not limit the overall size of the business, the configuration of its interior space, or its kind of operations. Still, many businesses and banks currently exceed the proposal’s limit, often by multiples of four and five.

Owen McShane: Why so much Dissent?

There is a wave of dissent spreading throughout the Western World in response to the failed experiment in central planning at the local and regional level of Government. For some reason we have suffered decades of top-down local planning in spite of the total failure of central planning in economies as diverse as the Soviet Empire, Maoist China, and North Korea.

This wave has now become a flood and is attracting attention in all quarters. During the property boom, triggered by the planners’ excessive regulation of land markets, and powered by the speculative bubble and lending, the rapid inflation in land prices allowed the planners to fund their excessive interventions and compliance costs, and of course their own salaries and fees, because the “speculators” and developers could absorb the costs.

Martin Durkin: Three Cheers for Urban Sprawl

“Hands off Our Land!” screams the Daily Telegraph, like some shotgun-toting red-faced farmer.  The newspaper, on behalf of the reactionary toffs who form the least pleasant section of its readership, has launched a campaign directed against ‘urban sprawl’ (ie. the rest of us).

On a good day, the Telegraph serves up enlightened articles by progressive liberals like Janet Daley and Simon Heffer and Jeff Randal (I’m talking about real liberals here, not American Trotskyites).  But then it disappears under the desk, drinks some devilish, bubbling potion and emerges looking like Mr Hyde, all wonky teeth and messy hair.  “Hands off Our Land” is the Telegraph at its worst - a campaign to thwart the government’s all-too-modest suggestions to reform Britain’s vicious planning laws.

Phil McDermott: Rethink the Link ...should Auckland pour money into a hole in the ground

Anchoring the CBD, or Sinking it?
A cornerstone of the Draft Auckland Plan is implementing an underground inner city rail link.  At an estimated $2.3bn this is the single most expensive new commitment in the plan, and accounts for around 15% of capital spending identified. This seems a big price to pay to transform what is already a perfectly functional CBD with adequate and improving public transport (PT) arrangements. And unless it makes a substantial difference, it could become a major fiscal anchor on Auckland’s development.  This posting considers the prospects.

Why?
So why do we need the inner city rail link?

Owen McShane: Unwinding the Sustainable Development Mindset

I am frequently reminded of Richard Prebble's commentary on the wonderful TV Show “Yes Minister” (still running on SKY). He said “The public thinks that “Yes Minister” is a comedy, the civil service knows that it's a documentary, and the Cabinet Ministers know that it’s a tragedy.”

I last quoted Prebble’s comment in an essay “Can a New Government Actually Change Anything?” written just before the last change in government. Maybe it is time to re-visit it.