Living the dream in Waimakariri
A plastics factory on a lifestyle block? Waimakariri has become lifestyle central since since the earthquakes. But its free and easy approach is coming into question. John Mccrone reports.
It sounds sneaky. Buy a lifestyle block on a back road just outside Rangiora and apply to build a big green 1100 sq metre barn. Next apply to the council for a change of use and – bang – turn it into a plastics factory sitting in the middle of nowhere.
Waimakariri District Council Mayor David Ayers shifts uncomfortably in his chair as he describes how it happened.
Yes, it looks like you could drive a bus through the council’s current planning regulations. And yes, Waimakariri probably does need to reconsider its ‘‘effects-based’’ approach to its district plan. Time perhaps for a more active and directive approach, Ayers concedes.
Lifestyle blocks – farmland subdivided down to the 4 hectare rural limit deemed practical in terms of wells, septic tanks, and the other necessities of rural life – have become a feature of much of New Zealand.
Bugger the idea of green belts and other restrictions meant to keep cities and even rural townships sharply divided from the surrounding productive countryside from which the nation still makes its primary living.
In the way Aussies dream of an escape to the beach, Kiwis dream of owning their own pint-sized country paradise with alpacas, chooks, walnut trees and a chunky ride-on mower.
And so – especially where councils have taken a relaxed attitude to rural fringe zoning – a new intermediate use of land has become absolutely widespread.
In a study of the valuation data, Landcare researcher John Dymond found that following the 1990s introduction of the more permissive, effects-based, Resource Management Act (RMA), the great national lifestyle carveup really took off.
Dymond says by 2011, lifestyle blocks had taken over nearly 900,000ha of New Zealand – or 5 per cent of all land outside national reserves.
Even worse, that comprised 10 per cent of the country’s best soils. And the way things are moving, it will be 20 per cent within a decade or so.
So it is a land use change that has happened fast. And about fastest of all in Waimakariri.
Particularly since the earthquakes, the district’s farmland has been divided up like mad. The latest council figures show that out of 25,000 properties, fully 6600, or 28 per cent, are now lifestyle sections – outnumbering farms six to one.
And the shift has become selfreinforcing. Ayers admits there is a feedback loop going on.
People are being pushed out of Christchurch with decent insurance settlements. Prompted to make a choice, they are opting for the rural alternative in large numbers.
He can name his wife’s dentist, an engraver, a furniture restorer – all businesses that were in Christchurch but which now trade from the countryside in lifestyle hotspots like Ohoka, Mandeville and Fernside.
This has pushed up the value of land so that now farmers – even dairy farmers – are finding Waimakariri too expensive if they want to expand and shift to the kind of volume production that modern agriculture demands.
The logical response is instead to just cash in the family spread. Perhaps keep the homestead as a small section and divide up the rest into another dozen or so lifestyle blocks to be tossed onto a hungry market.
‘‘A subdivision only occurs because a farmer subdivides. And in hard times for farmers, that’s often the only way they’ll get a return on their investment,’’ Ayers says.
Thus quicker than people realise, the character of the countryside is being transformed. Then comes what seems to be happening now – the next step as the lifestylers start to assert their newfound dominance.
Planners call it reverse sensitivity. Urban folk moving out – often well-heeled professionals – start organising to protect their new way of life. Certainly Waimakariri is now witnessing a wave of local planning
At Burnt Hill near Oxford, there is a community protest against the proposed Waimakariri Irrigation storage pond. The worry is its walls could burst in an earthquake. The council initially granted a consent but now this major farming project remains tied up in the Environment Court as objectors pursue it on technicalities.
In Eyrewell, residents of a recent lifestyle block subdivision in Issac Rd – a chunk carved off historic Claxby farm – are now raising a storm because the last few sections may be snapped up by Christchurch Ready Mix Concrete to use as shingle pits. The residents say quarrying might be a normal permitted rural use, but those rules need to be rewritten to respect the needs of those who have moved out to the country for a quiet life.
At Flaxton, lifestylers have been complaining about a neighbouring rural block being employed as a demolition scrapyard since the earthquakes. Again it is a permitted use, but who wants constant truck movements and smelly bonfires next door.
Then in Mandeville, there have been protests against plans for a new ‘‘village centre’’.
Ayers says the developer wants to build a supermarket, petrol station and small cluster of shops and cafes. You would have thought the majority in the area would want such a hub.
Yet some are saying it will spoil the ‘‘lifestyle character’’ of Mandeville, so that too is in the hands of commissioners.
Finally there is this factory, Advantage Plastics, making skips, grain silos, road barriers, trailers and even small plastic boats, which has popped up on a lifestyle section in Easterbrook Rd, south of Rangiora.
In fact, it is not as dramatic as it sounds, Ayers agrees. The factory is indeed in a big green barn, set well back from the road, so looks just like another regular farm building sandwiched between the horse studs and alpaca hobby farms.
And he says Advantage Plastics did tick the boxes to get its activities approved as being within rural zone rules. The council passed it on noise and traffic. Environment Canterbury (ECan) checked it off on emissions and stormwater.
However neighbours, like landscape architect Grant Edge, also acting chair of the Waimakariri water zone committee, reply it is patently crazy that local planning laws could allow an industrial business to set up like this.
Edge says Rangiora has a purpose built industrial park only a kilometre away. ‘‘It’s fully serviced by council for sewerage discharge and all those sorts of things.’’
Yet through clever use of a loophole, a precedent has been set where commercial manufacturers can just buy a cheap 4ha block of land and move in among the lifestylers.
Edge says it might be too late to stop this particular factory. It is built and only a costly judicial review might budge it. But the council needs to move quickly and write new rules. ‘‘Now the bigger picture is key – to prevent it happening again and again and again.’’
It is confusing probably because it is conflicting.
Many might think – despite being a delightful way to live – the countryside ought to be for farming. The lifestyle blocks should not really be there, so sympathy for their problems would be rather limited.
Tough luck if a plastics factory has been allowed under the very same loose rural zoning laws. Suck it up if a quarry turns up next door as a traditional rural fringe activity.
But then on the other hand, the lifestyle blocks have been permitted. And they now exist in such number they need their own ‘‘fit for purpose’’ protection for everyone’s sake.
Rural zoning designed for large farms is fine when the only industries likely to be setting up camp in the countryside are proper agriculture support businesses.
Likewise quarries hard up to property boundaries and hammering away all week with dust and trucks is not such a problem when surrounded mostly by a farmer’s open paddocks.
Yet once lifestylers have colonised whole areas like they have in Waimakariri, then you can see why this new intermediate land use has to be suitably recognised in a district plan.
John Fairweather, a former professor of rural sociology at Lincoln University, now making a living running a specialty timber business on a 20ha block near Sefton in Waimakariri, says the lifestyler issue has had remarkably little public airing given how significant a change it actually is.
Fairweather started tracking the development of smallholdings, as they were first called, on the outskirts of greater Christchurch in the 1990s.
He says in the early days – preRMA – the blocks were generally bigger. They were still meant to be self-supporting mini-farms.
And councils like Waimakariri tried to ensure the land would be used productively when granting any subdivision. Consent depended on a promise of a starting a rural business – hence a lot of olive groves and goat farms that then struggled to turn a profit.
‘‘Decades ago, the district councils did try to head it off. They applied restrictions. But they were hopelessly ineffective. So they gave up,’’ Fairweather says.
A study in 2000 found there were some 8000 smallholdings in a
‘‘A subdivision only occurs because a farmer subdivides. And in hard times for farmers, that’s often the only way they’ll get a return on their investment.’’ Waimakariri District Council Mayor David Ayers
40km ring round Christchurch. There were a whole host of hotspots developing wherever the countryside was pretty and the commute reasonable – places like Tai Tapu, Yaldhurst, Little River and Styx.
Of these smallholdings, some 60 per cent Fairweather found to be lifestylers or hobby farmers. They depended on a city job or other income to make it work.
They might grow a few hazelnuts or lease a paddock, but their average earnings were under $5000 a year. Only 10 per cent made more than $50,000 from the land they owned.
So Fairweather says even 20 years ago, good soils were being bought and land holdings fragmented to a size which could no longer pay their own way. Yet this has been allowed to continue at a rapid rate with barely a murmur.
He says the lack of debate is partly explained because the lifestylers themselves formed no natural political lobby. As a group, they are naturally diverse.
‘‘Most smallholders are fully employed in other occupations. So they’ve got no material need to be recognised as an organisation and express their views collectively.’’
They might have had shared concerns – like a desire for more appropriate zoning protection and even the permission to buy more sensible sized plots, like down to just 1ha rather than being made to buy at least 4ha.
But it is only now in Waimakariri that lifestyler bodies – like the Issac Rd residents group – are starting to form.
Then Fairweather says coming from the other side – the farmers who as producers are well represented by their lobbies like Federated Farmers – have been relatively silent as well because of course they are split about the benefit of being able to sell off land to lifestylers whenever it suits.
But also, he says, New Zealand farming has been undergoing a wave of intensification where more money is being produced from less land. ‘‘There are figures that show while sheep numbers have gone down, the value of sheep exports has been maintained.’’
For that reason, the loss of soils has not been quite the hot industry topic you might expect, says Fairweather.
So there are a variety of explanations for why lifestyle subdivisions are being ignored. However Green Party environment spokesperson and list MP, Eugenie Sage, sees a far more overtly political dimension at work.
She says a laissez-faire approach to lifestyle blocks has been quite deliberate – especially in Waimakariri. It is part of a right-wing philosophy of light handed regulation.
Sage says the RMA was only going to work as intended if councils added policy statements designed to put a brake on negative effects like the loss of versatile soils. If the community gave prior voice to an objection, commissioners in consent hearings would have to take note.
‘‘But Waimakariri has consciously encouraged lifestyle blocks by making it very easy for rural landholders to subdivide. If they wanted to stop that, they could have had much stricter controls on subdivision.’’
Sage – part of the ECan council table sacked in 2010 – also points a finger at the way Canterbury’s regional council has been run since the Government put its own commissioners in charge.
She says she can remember when it was tough, yet ECan still fought hard against sprawling rural developments like Clearwater Resort and Pegasus Town.
‘‘Under the RMA, it was hard to contain Christchurch city, to implement a green belt or urban limit. But now good planning is bad-mouthed all the time. There is no agency looking forward 50 years, taking the strategic view.’’
Sage agrees that in the short term, taking the brakes off development has an economic benefit. Waimakariri has been a boom district because it has had the fewest restrictions on people doing what they want.
‘‘But we’re going to regret this just in terms of the ugly land use planning, and the ugly settlement patterns and industrialisation that we’re getting,’’ Sage says.
This plastics factory in Easterbrook Rd is exactly what she is talking about. It is a symptom of where we have arrived because we weren’t watching, she says.
‘‘We can’t continue to have the kind of lackadaisical planning and ad hoc development that we’ve been able to get away with in the past.
Putting an ear to the ground in fact reveals rumblings right across Canterbury. Even Ashburton District Council has become worried about the fragmentation of good farming land around Ashburton, Methven and Rakaia.
In its last district plan, there was a ‘‘proactive’’ rezoning of land for 4ha low density living. If lifestyling can’t be stopped, the intention is that it can at least be directed towards particular locations.
Selwyn has also sought to organise subdivision activity, keeping it concentrated in rings around Rolleston and other townships.
But Waimakariri seems the front line. Spokesperson for the Issac Rd quarry protesters, Bud Caldwell – an architectural designer familiar with local planning rules – says the district has the problem that it lacks a clear geography.
Caldwell says its big town, Rangiora, is off the main track. So development pressures have been more dispersed. The lifestyle hotspots have formed all over the district with little particular connection to any existing infrastructure.
Sorting Waimakariri out retrospectively will be a difficult task for the council. However it does need a new district plan, says Caldwell. And rules to protect lifestylers are a must.
Back at the town hall, Ayers says the wheels are in motion. The message from the community is clear enough. Council planning officers have started work on a replacement district plan which will be activities-based – a return to something more directive.
However that will take about three years to deliver. It is not an instant remedy. And also Ayers questions whether Waimakariri has that much of a problem.
He says the plastics factory is definitely unfortunate. Yet the irrigation dam is a more general issue than just lifestylers expressing a reverse sensitivity, while Mandeville’s shopping hub is likely welcomed by the silent majority.
Ayers points out that Waimakariri has a lot of new lifestyle blocks, but also a massive amount of ordinary new subdivisions around Rangiora, Kaiapoi and Woodend.
And many like the district’s fast economic growth. Also should the Kiwi love affair with the pint-sized paradise be thwarted? Ayers says it is mainly those still stuck in the city who take such a black and white view on maintaining proper urban boundaries.
So Waimakariri is going to be looking to its planning laws. But it is not so clear – at least to him – that very much is actually wrong, he concludes with a mayor’s political caution.
‘‘Waimakariri has consciously encouraged lifestyle blocks by making it very easy for rural landholders to subdivide.’’ Green Party environment spokesperson and list MP, Eugenie Sage