Yes In My Backyard says a new generation
A generation facing housing pain is all in favour of intense development, writes Dileepa Fonseka.
Many baby boomers spent their youth campaigning against big bad property developers who wanted to build high-rise apartments. Now they’re facing a rebellion from young people who prefer apartment developments and medium-density townhouses to the villas and suburban sprawl older generations fought so hard for.
Not in my backyard-ers (Nimbys) on both sides of the political spectrum have a long history of opposing multi-storey developments in the main metropolitan centres of Auckland, Hamilton, Christchurch and Wellington – often on the grounds of heritage, environmental concerns, or a generic opposition to property development.
Recently they have started facing growing opposition from another force: The Yimbys (yes in my backyard-ers), a growing cohort of millennials and zoomers who see densification in inner suburbs as a way of bringing housing costs down while minimising infrastructure costs and transport emissions.
City for People campaigner Isla Stewart says the pushback comes from a lot of young people realising how housing costs had made them poor.
“For a lot of us it’s very personal. I spend a lot of my money, I still do, on rent. On housing. It’s the biggest cost in my budget. It is for a lot of people,” she says.
“You look at the house that you have, and it doesn’t feel like you’re getting much out of it. And then you start to look into ‘well, why is it like this?’, and you realise ‘wow, this council doesn’t let people build higher than three storeys in most of the city, that can’t be good for affordability’.
“You sort of get progressively upset and angry at the way that successive Governments have restricted housing supply.”
Harvard University doctoral student Jacob Anbinder is researching this political phenomenon in the United States.
He says people across the world are beginning to see those who campaigned against development as part of the modern housing problem.
Anbinder says housing intensification issues have flipped political priorities on the Democratic side of politics in the US as more “liberals” in large urban areas start taking the side of once-vilified property developers behind large-scale developments.
“It has led to a very bitter fight within liberalism in America over whether new development, and just urban growth in general, fit into a progressive vision for cities.”
Activists tied up in these fights overseas have been sharing information with like-minded social movements here, too.
City for People is Wellington’s version of this movement and Stewart (who has recently moved to Auckland) says they regularly share tips with their counterparts in places like California on how to better campaign for density.
The biggest contribution these American activists made was to persuade them to campaign on a positive vision of how good density could be for inner-city suburbs.
Fights like these are on the way for all of New Zealand’s major cities with a new National Policy Statement on Urban Development requiring councils to zone for higher-density housing along rapid transit routes and remove other impediments to densification in metropolitan centres.
As a sign of things to come, Christchurch mayor Lianne Dalziel and her council have already attacked the policy statement for encouraging too much density.
“It does seem infuriating, particularly when over-intensification is a big issue for our residents, and it is something we are committed to addressing,’’ she said in November.
Stewart says most of the people who come around to her way of thinking start to realise squeezing more units on to a plot of land by building upwards is the best way to tackle high land prices. That is important because high land costs are the major cause of skyrocketing property prices.
Many also believe density is better for the environment too. Pack people in closer
to the city centre, and it’s easier for them to walk or cycle to work.
Yet in the 1970s, community activists in Stewart’s position traditionally advocated for less density rather than more of it.
In the middle of the 20th century a post-war infrastructure and construction boom in the US led to city areas being demolished to make way for high-rises and highways. Many of these projects caused major environmental issues too.
Ethnic communities in the US also found themselves dislocated and bearing the brunt of major housing and infrastructure redevelopments.
So a new set of values took hold in reaction to all of this which emphasised factors such as environmental protection, historic preservation, and community and neighbourhood self-determination.
Over time, though, the rules that came out of this form of activism became a weapon to stop the supply of new housing, often to the benefit of existing homeowners who saw the values of their properties soar as a result.
Environmental protection rules made the supply of new housing costly. Historic preservation regulations prevented new taller buildings taking the place of older ones. Community and neighbourhood self-determination mechanisms allowed communities to block new housing developments.
Anbinder says these were understandable reactions to the rampant pro-development drive of the 1970s. The problem was these movements have now been shoe-horned into a form of protection for already-wealthy residents.
‘‘One of the most powerful successes of the yes in my backyard movement has been to illuminate the fact that many of the neighbourhoods that oppose development are not in fact those neighbourhoods that have been historically discriminated against.
‘‘In fact, they are quite wealthy neighbourhoods whose residents have become adept at repurposing the language of social justice to preserve income inequality and segregation in the places where they live.’’
In New Zealand, the early 1970s saw a massive construction boom with unprecedented numbers of homes being constructed. On the other side of the fence community activism against these developments increased.
During the 1960s city planners in Wellington had mapped out a high-rise vision of the suburb of Thorndon with height limits raised to 32 metres (roughly eight storeys or more) and plans to demolish character and heritage homes which, at the time, were viewed as shabby and in need of redevelopment.
By the end of the 1970s this high-rise vision was in retreat as fierce community opposition to densification saw Thorndon go the other way and become New Zealand’s first built heritage conservation area instead.
Community opposition crystallised around a highdensity apartment development called Melksham Towers which raised the ire of many young community activists at the time.
In 1975, Victoria University’s student publication Salient noted: ‘‘Even if the Mt Victoria residents have been too late to stop the construction of the Melksham Towers monstrosity, they have been successful in building a much closer community which is more aware of the injustices that surround it and the forces that control it’’.
However, a lot of the restrictions that came out of this era increased the cost of housing by reducing its availability and putting roadblocks in front of developers.
A Productivity Commission report released in 2015 cited studies showing that height limits in Auckland had reduced the number of units that could have been built in big developments by up to 29 per cent, and heritage controls had wiped 30,000 to 40,000 future dwellings off Auckland Council’s housing targets.
These controls have existed for so long that Yimbys don’t have to just bring residents over to their point of view, but council staff as well.
Wellington City Council’s newly-appointed chief planning officer, Liam Hodgetts, made headlines when he expressed admiration for how San Francisco had ‘‘integrated character into the growth of the city’’ in the middle of an article where he said pro-density campaigners would have to make some concessions on intensification.
The comments caused a huge backlash. They puzzle Anbinder too. He sees San Francisco as a warning rather than a roadmap.
‘‘I definitely would dispute that characterisation of San Francisco . . . there are many, many neighbourhoods where it is virtually illegal to build any new housing.
‘‘San Francisco in the American context is really the poster child for the affordability crisis that has resulted from having too many restrictions on the growth of the city and of the housing supply of the city.
‘‘It has become a model in the US for precisely what not to do.’’
So does this mean developers are the good guys now for this generation? Not really, but perhaps they are in comparison to investors who buy and sell second-hand homes.
‘‘I don’t think developers are the good guys, but building homes is important,’’ Anbinder says.
‘‘The people who make money now off of a lack of housing, they’re not even providing the basic service of building new homes. They’re merely making money off sitting on existing homes.
‘‘I think that we need to accept that fact that it is a much more socially useful thing to have people building homes than to have people making money off of housing scarcity.’’
A Productivity Commission report said heritage controls had wiped 30,000 to 40,000 future dwellings off Auckland Council’s housing targets.