As publicised this week Auckland Council’s Policy and Planning Committee has agreed to release draft changes to planning rules to go to the council’s local boards and mana whenua for their feedback.  Proposed changes, with a branding of ‘Safer, smarter, better-connected‘ would enable the following:

Taller buildings in new catchment areas: 15–storey buildings permitted within 10 minutes’ walk of 21 large town centres and stations offering frequent transport; 10–storey buildings permitted within 10 minutes’ walk of 23 medium sized town centres and stations; six–storey buildings permitted within 10 minutes’ walk of 22 additional town centres and stations.

Major bus routes would see six-storey buildings enabled either side of the road, up to 200 metres back.

As announced on 19 August the intent of any plan changes is to deliver on housing capacity requirements by “focusing housing opportunities in safe locations in and around our town centres and along our transport networks”.

UDF member Graeme Scott was on Morning Report this morning to discuss the evolving approach that is taking shape. The recording of their conversation can be listened to on RNZ – and a transcript follows here

Corin Dan (Morning Report, RNZ): Let’s get to Auckland density now and housing because the Auckland Council has given a green light to a draft plan for housing density around key transport routes and town centres. Part of the plan is now to be sent out for feedback. Now it does involve some high-rise buildings up to 15 storeys in some areas. It basically is an alternative that the Council is coming up (with) to what would have been an enforced plan from the Government, the density plan, which could have seen three storey buildings across Auckland. It’s all about trying to accommodate much more growth in the city – up to 2 million homes over many decades ahead. Just trying to get my head around how best to explain this. You’ve got a number of forces at play here. Essentially the Government, in its wisdom, had said it wants Auckland to accommodate a lot more housing and it was going to do that by basically changing the RMA and say that you could build three stories anywhere. Instead, the Council was given the opt out option of that, if it came up with its own plan and has started to do that, which would involve high rise buildings around railway stations and transport hubs and that sort of thing.

Graeme Scott (UDF Aotearoa): Correct, and that gets our strong support for sure. The idea of just spreading three story terrace houses over the whole of the Isthmus and beyond is not working very well, there been some spectacularly poor ones built, and we think a rethink is needed and this is along the right lines.

Corin: What is the problem with the three story first? Is it that it’s three stories and that creates view issues and those sort of things, or is it just the sprawl element whereby you’ve got to find the infrastructure and you’ve got that issue?

Graeme: It’s partly just the homogeneity of it Corin. When you look at the individual sites that these buildings go on, they’re almost entirely covered in concrete to accommodate the cars that need to be parked there.  There’s very little green space and there’s not a lot of privacy for the people living in them, to be honest. The houses all overlook each other’s yards and so on and so forth. We think that a properly designed apartment building, even if it is 15 stories, would be a much better outcome, would give increased density where it’s needed and could leave, well to an extent, leave the garden suburb alone, because the garden suburb is a great thing to have. We don’t want to destroy it. I think concentrating growth around the transport nodes is the right way to go.

Corin: 10 to 15 storeys, that’s pretty high. I mean, in some of these areas, you’re talking Kingsland and places like that, that’s going to change those suburbs dramatically, isn’t it?

Graeme: Yeah and if it’s done right, it would be a change for the better, that’s for sure. There’s ways of doing these things that really give great urban outcomes, [creating] places that people actually want to visit, not just the people who happen to live there, but other people. They become attractors in their own right. And we think that given the right process that Council is sort of embarking on, let’s give it a go, we’ve got to try.

Corin: You know what the criticism is here, right, or has been (and)  I’m not sure if it’s still so relevant is that this is people in leafy suburbs not wanting to have their beautiful character villas spoilt by a three story building on the corner. And that it’s wealthy Auckland’ the landowning Auckland that’s kind of forced this.

Graeme: Yeah, that’s partly true. You know, I don’t want to get into a controversy particularly, but the garden suburb, the leafy suburb of the heritage houses is a thing, and we’ve got to acknowledge that it is attractive to a lot of people. That’s why ramping up the density in other areas, like the ones proposed, is so important to compensate for that, because at the moment the population in the inner suburbs of Auckland is actually falling because wealthy people can afford more space, sort of a given. And that’s exactly the opposite to what we need. We need a lot more people close to the centre to get the economic activity and the productivity of the city up.

Corin: So what’s this walkable catchment? How far are we talking? … because if you can walk to one of these new City Rail Link stations and then can take that into work, or even further out and that train line starts to get a lot better, that’s going to be a huge economic advantage.

Graeme: Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve made a huge investment in it, it’s billions of dollars, so we’ve got to really try and get the best return we can and that’s by getting a lot of people living close to it and using it. I won’t go into it too much detail, but there’s a whole productivity argument around density close to the centre of the city, that applies worldwide, you know, there’s a lot of research on it. I think that we’ve got to try and leverage that effect in Auckland because the Auckland productivity is not great, to be honest.