Auckland: Where "confusion" is the leitmotif

 

Auckland's houses were built in the main by spec builders. If you're living in a house in Auckland, chances are you're enjoying the payoff of someone who saw profit in the equation Selling-Price = Land-Cost + Build-Cost + Profit.

To make houses affordable in Auckland essentially means making it safe again for spec builders to make those profits.

Instead, as costs rise and selling prices fall that profit margin has been rapidly disappearing, and life for Auckland's spec builders has been made both unprofitable and more uncertain.

Make no mistake: Even when the money is there, to plan a development years ahead needs certainty.

But consider: In recent years would-be developers and spec builders faced up to the changes from Auckland's many different District plans to one overarching Unitary Plan. Big changes, still being absorbed.

While still absorbing those however, they then had to then confront the changes announced by the bipartisan Medium Density Residential Standards (MRDS) and National Policy Statement - Urban Development (NPS-UD) -- both of which liberalised what you can do on your land, but still causing massive uncertainty.

As a measure of just how much uncertainty, on one isthmus site I'm working on, the difference between the old days and today amounts to the difference between being allowed to build five houses to being able to build around twenty-five. That's a big change.

But it's not there yet: Auckland is still holding hearings on what it calls Plan Change 78 [PC78] to give effect to all those acronyms above.

But those hearings are paused. They are paused to introduce intensification rules while Auckland Council investigates Labour's "Light Rail Corridor," and responds to recent storm events.

That Light Right Corridor alone amounts to massive uncertainty all along its proposed route.

But there's more: While those hearings for the PC78 changes are paused, adding to the uncertainty is the National Party's brain explosion last month that they're now going to backtrack on their support for the bipartisan MRDS, instead announcing who knows what. (And the ACT Party are foolishly supporting them.)

To add even more uncertainty, Auckland Council released its own Future Development Strategy (FDS) last week which lays out its  own "big-picture vision" for "how and where Auckland should grow over the next 30 years." As if they would know. 

The FDS updates the Council’s previous Future Urban Land Supply Strategy 2017, and calls for more development close to the city centre, and much less development on the fringes. This could involve down-zoning city fringe land from so-called Future Urban back to a non-urban zone.

The key areas where  these changes to zoning have been indicated are said to be Kumeu/Huapai, Drury, Takanini and Hatfields Beach. Other areas under investigation are Warkworth, Dairy Flat, Wainui East, Upper Orewa, Riverhead, Albany Village and Oruarangi.

Contrast this with National's now-stated aim, if elected, to make it harder to build near city centres, and less challenging to build out on the fringes. So this might mean upzoning city-fringe land. Land in places like Kumeu/Huapai, Drury, Takanini and Hatfields Beach etc.

Are you keeping up?

Because your city's spec builders are supposed to.

And this is all called "planning." What a joke.