A low blow for city’s high hopes
One commentator has slammed them as ‘‘short-sighted’’ and ‘‘mental’’. Council officers have called them ‘‘a lost opportunity’’.
But two prominent Wellington developers are defending controversial projects that appear to fly in the face of a city plan to build more high-density, high-rise housing in the capital.
Wellington City Council is working through its Spatial Plan, which will encourage high-density 10-storey high-rises in the inner-city and particularly along key transport routes.
It’s doing that in part because of the Government’s National Policy Statement on Urban Development released last year, and also because it predicts 30,000 more people will call the inner-city home over the next two decades.
Meanwhile, with supply so short, house prices have soared. The median price in Wellington crossed $1.1 million last month.
But in two key sites, developers have gone quite deliberately in the other direction from the council’s plans. On 7500 square metres of land on the corner of Taranaki and Jessie streets, Thames Pacific is building 151 terraced houses inspired by character homes in the Sydney suburb of Paddington.
Thames Pacific principal Stephen Sutorius admits his homes will accommodate about 300 people on a site that could have taken three times that many.
Just a few hundred metres away, on a smaller site circled by Victoria, Willis and Vivian streets, Ian Cassels’ The Wellington Company is about to build 61 similar homes, plus 48 ‘‘minimalist’’ one-bedroom apartments as part of its Aro development.
Cassels concedes there will be about 200 people living in an area that could have taken 700.
Sutorius denies that it’s an opportunity lost. His company considered a high-rise development of the former car sales yard, but he was told the city’s creaking infrastructure couldn’t take the extra load.
There was a strong demand for inner-city housing that didn’t come with body corporate levies and associated committees, he says.
‘‘At the time the market was coming out of the Kaiko¯ ura earthquake and there was a lot more demand for terraced housing, lowrise accommodation versus apartments and high rise,’’ Sutorius says.
‘‘A lot of it was people wanting to have that accommodation in the city, a walking distance to the shops and work . . . and a style of accommodation accustomed to an area like Lyall Bay or Miramar.’’
Sutorius says the project has been so popular that it could have been sold 10 times over.
Housing densification advocate Isabella Cawthorn thinks it certainly is a big opportunity missed.
‘‘I just wish he had put more units on there and then he could have sold it 10 times over,’’ she says.
Cassels too had considered a high-rise option for the inner-city car park his company bought for $18.5m. The previous owner even had resource consent to build four high-density blocks.
But the developer was inspired by the vision of counterpart Sutorius. ‘‘Stephen’s example to us all was that there was a significant section of the market that wasn’t being looked after, and it was a good idea,’’ Cassels said.
With Wellington in desperate need of housing, many say both projects are ‘‘underdevelopments’’.
Cawthorn has labelled the projects ‘‘short-sighted’’ and ‘‘mental’’ in a city with a clear plan to dramatically increase densification.
‘‘You’ve got a really good public mandate that says let’s intensify the urban centres and the central city. . . where you have tall stuff, big stuff,’’ she says. ‘‘If you want to build your two, three-storey things, put them in the suburban centres. Put it in Mt Cook, put it in Mt Vic, don’t put it in the middle of Taranaki St; that’s going to be where the mass transit goes.’’
Cassels claims they are actually points of progress in the city.
‘‘There’s no question that Wellington’s average [density in housing] has got to be better than that [Aro development], but that’s 10 times better than a car-parking site,’’ he says. ‘‘But the overwhelming argument is that the city needs variety and flexibility; it can’t be all the same – that is Soviet, if you go 10 storeys everywhere, you are just going to have a 10-storey mentality.’’
Cassels thinks his mix of expensive terraced housing and more affordable apartments will bring more people and money into the city. ‘‘The value of the city is in its ratepayers,’’ he says. ‘‘Getting people into town is the absolute key for Wellington; it is the answer to our pipes, it’s how you make wealth, getting more people into the same area, using the same pipe.’’
Cassels supports the council’s Spatial Plan. ‘‘We should adopt a plan that has 30-40,000 more people in the CBD, because that’s the wealth-making plan for Wellington.’’
But that shouldn’t involve a ‘‘brainless bottom line’’ of only 10-plus-level monoliths. ‘‘We would say our developments are in line with the best interests of the city.’’
Wellington City Council’s Strategy and Policy Committee will consider and possibly adopt the final Spatial Plan on June 24, with consultation scheduled for October, at the earliest. It is set to be adopted as part of the District Plan in May 2022.
Until then, rules are rules, and developers are merely following them, says chief planner Liam Hodgetts.
Not that the council is thrilled that both Sutorius and Cassels haven’t followed the spirit of what the local body is trying to achieve.
Council officers initially took a dim view of the resource consent application for the Paddington development.
The development was ‘‘a lost opportunity’’, said the council’s Urban Design Team, and ‘‘fails to deliver the volume of housing that a site of this size might usefully contribute to the city’s future growth expectations’’.
That concern has been shared by others, says Hodgetts.
‘‘Jo and Ann on the street recognise that that’s an underdevelopment of those sites,’’ she says. ‘‘This is why we are overhauling the old plan . . . not getting the outcomes that this moment in time needs.’’
But Councillor Fleur Fitzsimons, who holds the council’s housing portfolio, agrees the current rules are ‘‘no longer fit for purpose’’.
‘‘We can’t let that happen across the city,’’ she says. ‘‘The plan needs to be reviewed to consider height requirements and increase diversity.’’
Until that happens, the developers are seizing their moment.
But Hodgetts is not concerned. ‘‘[I’m] confident that these are small points on a large chess board at play here,’’ he says. ‘‘The market is very varied, from this type of outcome to apartment living, rent-to-buy, and there are active players in all of that.’’
The developers are confident that others will not follow their lead with similar proposals. Theirs are ‘‘really the last couple of significant landholdings in the city for this type of development’’, says Sutorius. ‘‘Land prices have gone right up, and trying to justify a land development like this would be near-on impossible to do.’’
Hodgetts is keen to get the balance right. ‘‘That’s all we can do – improve the regulatory environment to optimise the land we do have, and set the environmental climate for investment in residential property.’’
‘‘. . . the overwhelming argument is that the city needs variety and flexibility; it can’t be all the same – that is Soviet.’’
Ian Cassels
The Wellington Company