Don Brash: In defence of "Urban Sprawl"

In Newsroom today (8 June 2023), Dr Iresh Jayawardena, a lecturer in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland, has a column criticizing the National Party’s recently-announced housing policy.

He notes that the National Party’s proposed policy “would require councils in major towns and cities to zone for 30 years’ worth of growth immediately, with the option to opt out of the medium density standards law [which National and Labour had agreed on more than a year ago]”. He went on to note that:

Point of Order: Curbing the creep of concrete into the countryside to protect our most fertile land for food production

The Government’s policy to protect fertile land – food producers insist – has been too long coming.

The pace of urban sprawl and of concreting over fertile soils strongly suggests the growers are right. Over the past 20 years, about 35,000 hectares of our highly productive land has been carved up for urban or rural residential development while 70,000 hectares has been converted to lifestyle blocks.