Minister’s tough turn on housing hard to justify
Back in May, Housing and Urban Development Minister Phil Twyford was talking up his Government’s “bold” and “exciting” urbanisation project, while admitting that “to be honest, government doesn’t have much capability in this area”.
He told delegates to the 2018 Urbanism NZ Conference that: “One of my jobs is to build capability and expertise in the public service for urban development, urban design and the built environment.”
What he could offer was “the political will to work with you — the private sector . . . design practitioners, local government, academia, the campaigners and advocates”.
Four months later, all this loveydovey talk seems over. It’s time for the boxing gloves.
Auckland Council and its key planning document, the Unitary Plan, has failed to produce enough new housing.
The council, said Twyford, is “too close to the vested interests, like Nimbys. When it came time for tough and necessary decisions to create the Unitary Plan, too many councillors headed for the hills”.
Twyford’s solution to Auckland’s housing crisis is to set up an Urban Development Authority to mastermind major housing developments. The UDA will become “the planning and consenting authority” for those developments.
It will “be able to override the Unitary Plan” and will “have access to all the planning and consenting powers” currently held by council for those development areas.
So much for his pledge, a few months before, to work in partnership with local government, the developers and even the dreaded bogeymen, those “not in my backyard” Nimby neighbours.
Then, he’d suggested an eminently sensible solution to the so-called Nimby problem.
“Good design,” he said, was not just “the key to doing density well . . . it’s probably the only thing that will ease the fears of the Nimbys”.
But now, without even trying out this “good design” pill, Twyford is resorting to the tired old Wellingtonknows-best line — even though he’d admitted in May his public servants knew very little on this subject.
Don’t get me wrong. An urban development authority is a great idea. It’s a shame one wasn’t set up in Auckland 10 years ago when the dying Labour Government contemplated the idea. A shame too, that Prime Minister John Key, while interested, did nothing about it when developers suggested it to him, or when the NZ Productivity Commission pushed the concept in its 2015 report.
The closest we got seems to be the Hobsonville Land Company, set up