Is Auckland Council planning to raze the inner suburbs?
by Scott Caldwell
Introduction
Almost exactly 3 years ago, Auckland Council notified “Plan Change 78” (PC78) in response to government direction to allow apartments near major centres/transit stations and to allow townhouses throughout the suburbs.
Since then, Council has fought that government direction tooth and nail, while also facing extreme weather events like the infamous Auckland Anniversary floods in 2023. In lieu of this, Auckland Council decided it wanted to prevent development in flood and hazard sensitive parts of the city.
This has led to delays upon delays for PC78 while becoming a political knot for central government.
In May, the Minister relented on the townhouse direction, allowing for a new plan change process to begin – with the following stipulations:
It must be notified by October (a very tight deadline for a whole-of-city change)
It must allow for highly intensive development (10-15 stories) around the CRL stations
It must allow for at least the same amount of housing capacity as PC78
On Tuesday, the Council made their new plan public, ahead of the Planning Committee voting on the plan today.
This blog will examine The Good, The Bad, The Odd, and whether this plan meets the needs of the city.
The Good
In making up for capacity lost from the townhouse direction and down-zoning to account for flood zones, Auckland Council has instead chosen to allow for much more height around core stations. Specifically:
The walkable catchment (about 800 meters) of the higher tier of accessible and high demand stations/centres will be zoned to allow for 15 storey development
The walkable catchment the medium tier of accessibility and demand will be zoned to allow for 10 storey development
The walkable catchment of the lowest tier of accessibility and demand will be zoned to allow for 6 storey development
Additional to this, a small catchment (200m) around core frequent transport network will be zoned for 6 storey development. From looking at the maps, these seem to be the following corridors:
This is mostly the collection of the most popular bus routes, so these make a lot of sense to target as opportunities for intensification.
Beyond the mayor centres and transit network, most town and village centres will see some modest upzoning, with 6 storey apartments largely being permitted in the immediately adjacent land.
Updates are being made to the most common apartm ent zone (Terraced Housing and Apartment Buildings Zone, known affectionately as THAB). These are two particularly notable, positive changes:
Restaurants, cafes, dairies, and offices up to 200m² are now permitted by-right on the ground floor of apartment buildings. This is a very positive step towards mixed use neighbourhoods.
Changes are being made to allow 6 storey development much closer to the front boundary of sites, enabling perimeter block housing.
In suburban Auckland, most land which is not affected by hazards is now zoned for “Mixed Housing Urban” – a three storey townhouse zone. You’d be forgiven for being confused, as this seems to be exactly what Auckland Council was trying to get out of.
Unlike the previous directive, this does not allow for that typology “by-right”, meaning developers will still need to apply for resource consent which will be subject to a number of requirements from Council.
The Bad
Although height limits have been set at 10-15 stories in many critical locations, it’s not clear that it’s really possible to build that high. While raising the high limits, Auckland Council is also introducing “slender tower on a podium controls”. Keen readers will note that this is a re-run of a drama that played out just a couple of months ago in the City Centre.
These are specifically:
‘height in relation to boundary’ plane of 60 degrees above 20 meters for the front 21.5 of the site
‘height in relation to boundary’ plane of 60 degrees above 8 meters for the rest of the site
6 meter set-back from all sides above 6 stories
The ‘tower’ must fit within a 38 meter diameter circle
“In practice, these requirements mean most sites won’t physically fit a 10-15 storey building – and even if they could, the constraints would likely kill economic viability.
For a flagship apartment like Ockham’s Greenhouse (the exact type of development that this new plan should be promoting), this would likely mean lopping off the top 4 stories to get consent.
The other major issue preventing more developments like the Greenhouse is the perennial issue of special character areas. While parts of the city are seeing reductions in SCA as part of this plan, places like Ponsonby are still filled to the brim with blanket protections.
This is choking the city centre and harming the places they seek to protect. Census-to-census Ponsonby’s 18-35 population declined ~20% as its “preservation” leaves behind a suburb filled with empty nests. It doesn’t take a hyperactive imagination to connect this to the recent bout of high-profile closures of Ponsonby Road institutions.
The Odd
Having been created on quite a tight timeline, there are some odd things in this plan.
While the down-zoning in response to hazard-risk is broadly reasonable, Auckland Council has also used this opportunity to apply a blanket downzoning to anywhere 100m from the coastline as the crow flies (regardless of elevation).
It’s extremely unclear what risk, if any, this is trying to mitigate and creates some absurd outcomes:
Orakei, a station well above sea-level, has practically no catchment as it sits above the ocean.
Our spindly inlets that pervade the city makes this rule have quite a significant impact, with places as in-land as Middlemore hospital sitting under this overlay
The classification of which walkable catchments meet the high, medium, and low tiers contains a some surprises:
New Lynn is strictly more accessible than Henderson, and similarly has a train station and is a metro centre, but is only zoned for 10 rather than 15 stories
While Ellerslie is slightly further from the city than Greenlane, it sits at a natural crossroads and consequently it’s one of the busier train stations on the network – about 3 times as popular as Greenlane. So it’s somewhat surprising that Ellerslie is the tier below.
In implementing the changes to allow different built forms in the walkable catchments, Auckland Council has poured lots of new rules into the THAB zone, which apply conditionally based on where the THAB zoned site is.
It seems like it would be simpler for people trying to understand what can be built on their property or in their neighbourhood to have a new zone which caters to higher density residential development, leaving THAB for 3-6 storey development.
Verdict
At a high-level this plan looks really good, but there’s devil in the details and some strange things – but that’s to be expected from a plan produced on such a tight deadline.
Looking forward, if Council confirms this plan, the next steps will be a Ministerial statement of expectations for an independent panel to assess against this plan.
If they can course-correct on a few things, the bones of this plan will send Tamaki Makaurau on a vastly better trajectory over the next 30 years, on the path towards the kind of dense, walkable, resilient city its future demands.