Land sales aid housing push: Woods
Housing Minister Megan Woods has defended the Government’s decision to sell parcels of Auckland state land.
Woods said part of Auckland’s Crown-owned public housing land was being redeveloped and portions were being sold.
The Government was “not selling state housing”, just the land some of those houses once stood on.
“The public housing development’s large-scale projects involves selling certain parcels of Crownowned land where public housing land is being redeveloped,” Woods said.
“The sales allow us to finance our partnership with developers to deliver public and affordable housing such as KiwiBuild homes, in exchange for them building some housing on Crown land at market rates.”
Critics including National’s housing spokesman Chris Bishop called it “deeply hypocritical for the Labour Government to be engaging in this massive hock-off. Clearly, it makes financial sense for Ka¯inga Ora to sell land but the Labour Party’s traditional view of the world is that the state should never sell land, yet they’re going about it en masse here.”
Woods hit back: “I’m surprised to see the National Party speak out against the kind of regeneration that is being enabled, given they also bought into this model at a smaller scale at Hobsonville Point.
“Our Government is proudly undertaking the biggest rebuild of public housing since the 1970s, with brand new, warm, dry homes to replace old homes well past their use-by date,” she said.
The partnerships with developers to add affordable and market housing into these suburbs were resulting in the regeneration of Auckland areas.
“Creating a mix of housing as we do in these suburbs is hugely important for creating resilient communities . . . concentrating large amounts of solely public housing in one location, is not good for urban planning or communities.
“As ever, it would be great to hear what National’s policy is on public housing as well as what they would do to solve the housing crisis they presided over and left for Labour to deal with,” Woods said.
Mark Fraser, Ka¯inga Ora urban development and delivery general manager, estimated up to 60 per cent of Auckland’s large-scale holdings would be sold over 10 to 15 years to pay for a big state housing rebuild.
Ka¯inga Ora has 1397ha of Auckland state housing land, of which 458ha is in large-scale holdings. It’s 55 to 60 per cent of that 458ha which Fraser said was being sold.