In Wellington alone the Council have estimated that an additional 30,000 homes will be needed by 2043 !

For many years cities around the World have typically grown as the ‘newly weds’ and ‘first home owners’ have purchased the cheapest land on the city fringes. Governments and Councils have paid for the infrastructure, core services, and transport routes have ‘flowered out’ to the new settlements. The big box retailers have then followed. This is how Manakau City (our biggest city) and Paramatta City in Sydney came about.

Yet today, the Greens have presented their ideology saying that we must all live as close as possible to the central city areas, to reduce the use of vehicles and in doing so reduce the impact of climate change. They have also made the statement that they don’t want to see urban sprawl and the cities spread out like Auckland. However, Wellington is not a spread out city. It only takes 20 minutes to drive from one side of the city to the other ! There is plenty of vacant land on the city fringe.

Therefore, many of the attempts to create affordable housing for newly weds and first home owners has gone into building houses in the central city areas.

However, despite a lot of talk your many years and a strong desire to create affordable homes, there has been only a relatively small number of homes that have been built in the central city areas.

In Auckland an ‘affordable home’ was given at 2/3 the value of the registered valuation, resulting in a $900,000 affordable home price. By home, we mean a 3 bedroom home for a family, not just a shoebox apartment or bedsit.

However, a truely ‘affordable home’ for a first home buyer or newly wed is more like $600,000. The so called $900,000 affordable homes, were in fact unaffordable by most first home borrowers, yet often acquired by taking on a large debt. Unfortunately, for many of those who have taken on the large debt, with the 2023 interest rates, they may face significant financial stress, with the risk of ‘negative equity’ for many.

When looking closer at ‘why only a relatively small number of truly affordable homes have been built in the central city areas, the reasons become fairly obvious’. Namely;

• There are few very large land sites available to build on in the central areas, to bring down the land price per dwelling. Furthermore, to amalgamate new sites typically takes many years and can prove very costly to do so.
• If one combines the central city land cost, construction costs, consultant costs, associated development costs, financial costs and developers margin - it just becomes too prohibitive to construction truly affordable $600,000 homes in central city areas.
• At a time when the central city areas infrastructure is failing in our main cities, building on fragile infrastructure in the central city areas is a recipe for disaster. Furthermore, most of these central city areas do not have the provision to support extra capacity.
• Intensification in central city areas leads to a lot more impervious concrete surfaces, significantly reducing the ‘infiltration’ of water into the ground, during times of heavy rain in a climate change event and rivers form in central city areas. As was found to be the case in the recent Auckland storms. There was a cry from a past Auckland Mayor to holt all intensification of central city areas straightaway, until the approach was reassessed. The development of ‘sponge cities’ can help mitigate this problem, as was found in some cities in China.

This goes a long way in explaining why ‘Kiwi Build’ was such a disaster.

Architects and planners first priority is to the people. Many are extremely concerned about the level of intensification proposed in central city areas. It is anticipated that buildings in close proximity to each other will lead to a massive reduction in light. With the reduction in light it is anticipated that this will have a significant detrimental impact on the health of the population.

Furthermore, the firemen have expressed concerns that the new buildings will be too close together with building access becoming an issue. In addition, potential equipment resource issues to fight high rise fires.

When we use the land on the city fringe for building homes, we should always be selective in that we should retain quality land for food production.

Sadly, until there is a re-think by all those involved with the planning on where new homes should be constructed many first home owners and newly weds will miss out altogether. It will just not be possible to accommodate anywhere near the population increase anticipated by Council.

Martin Jenkins, Ohariu Candidate, Protect & Prosper New Zealand

Martin has worked as a professional property development consultant in Wellington and Sydney.

Akilla4@outlook.com

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