Bulldozers and ‘character’: The housing divide
Villa owners might think ‘character’ means the same thing as ‘heritage’, but that’s not necessarily the case,
The night before Auckland Council meets to discuss what it is going to do about the city’s character suburbs, a small group of housing activists gathers to discuss a new “coalition for homes”.
Greater Auckland blogger Scott Caldwell talks to the
Sunday Star-Times afterwards at Dainty, a late-night central city cafe overlooking Freyberg Place where they serve bubble tea in foot-long glasses till 4am.
Caldwell and others are getting ready to sit through and live-tweet from an Auckland Council planning committee meeting where councillors are set to discuss some of the same issues Wellington did just a week before.
These are all conversations prompted by the National Policy Statement on Urban Development, passed by the Government last year, which gives councils till the end of August next year to notify people about how they will amend their district plans to enable a lot more housing close to town and city centres.
Christchurch housing advocate Brendon Harre says the policy statement brings us closer to government-led planning edicts along the lines of those seen in countries like Japan where central government sets the different types of zones available and local authorities get little say.
It is already attracting some strong opposition. Not just in Auckland and Wellington, but from Christchurch mayor Lianne Dalziel. Dalziel said in a statement she actually supported the National Policy Statement on Urban Development but was worried about “over-intensification in some suburban areas of Christchurch, at the expense of amenity value for residents”.
Minter Ellison Rudd Watts law firm partner Bianca Tree agrees the level of prescription in the policy is unlike anything we have really seen before in the area of zoning.
She says there is some flexibility in it, though, and believes much of the public debate is going to come down to how councils interpret two concepts: “Walkable catchments” and “qualifying matters”.
Auckland Council announced a plan last week favouring “character” as a form of housing protected as a qualifying matter. This would save the areas these houses are in from being zoned for six storeys’-worth of development.
These character areas are dominated by housing built before 1944 – homes largely owned by the type of older, wealthier residents who tend to be reliable voters at local government elections.
Somewhat unsurprisingly at a planning committee meeting on Thursday, Auckland mayor Phil Goff strongly hit back at claims his council would “send in the bulldozers to wipe out villas” in these areas.
Auckland Council’s presentation at the meeting showed only a small proportion of land zoned for a particular level of development ever gets
developed at all, let alone to the maximum extent allowable.
This claim is likely to do little to calm down anxious residents. Harre says homeowners in these areas are mainly worried an apartment or townhouse might be built right next door and overlook their house.
Carolyn Hill, a heritage consultant and University of Waikato environmental planning doctoral student, says that even with character as a qualifying matter, many houses protected by character rules will need to be proven as being more than just old buildings.
Character is distinct from heritage. Heritage buildings are protected by law, but ‘‘character’’ is a relatively new concept.
Hill says city councillors came up with this distinct category of ‘‘character’’ because meeting historic heritage standards would have required them to prove the designs of these houses were of nationally significant importance.
‘‘People who own or live in these areas that are deemed special character see them as completely synonymous with heritage . . . People just talk about them being heritage areas with an implication that they should stay the way they are.
‘‘Whereas they are managed under this rather blobby thing called ‘special character’ which very much allows for and anticipates change.’’
This wider understanding of character is something Jasmax senior urban designer Ben van Bruggen is keen to emphasise too.
Character is not something set in stone. Instead, it is more correctly interpreted as something you can add to by developing the area.
He cites several examples to illustrate his point. What if you were replacing an unattractive old, low-quality building with a betterlooking newer building which enabled more people to go carfree and also was more affordable for people to live in?
Van Bruggen says this sort of improvement is character enhancing even if it involves getting rid of an old building.
‘‘Character can be improved, and you can improve the character by having a high-quality building.
‘‘If that building is a singlestorey building or a 10-storey building it can still be of higher quality than the buildings it was replacing.
‘‘And so if that building is of higher quality than the building it is replacing, then you must be improving the character.’’
Van Bruggen says a lot of these older character areas were built to accommodate older forms of transportation than the car, and are now within walking distance of central business districts.
This makes them important if we want to build housing that allows people to cut down on their emissions and live closer to employment centres or major public transport routes.
Tree says ‘‘walkable’’ catchments for the tier one cities of Auckland, Christchurch, Hamilton, Tauranga, and Wellington will probably prove a major cause of debate too. Councils will largely get to
‘‘Character can be improved, and you can improve the character by having a high-quality building.’’ Ben van Bruggen Jasmax senior urban designer
determine the definition of ‘‘walkable’’ in different areas.
This is important because under the policy statement, councils are required to enable at least six storeys within a walkable catchment of existing and planned rapid transit stops,
Caldwell sees this as a major way councils could cut down on
the amount of land that needs to be zoned for higher-density housing.
He has already seen Auckland Council pull off such a trick in March, when, he says, the council suggested it considered ‘‘walkable’’ to mean within 20 minutes of the city centre. In its latest document it has shaved five minutes off this, taking a lot of land off the board for intensification.
Then there are other things being used to wear down these walkable catchments even further, including Auckland’s hilly topography which, it argues, reduces these distances even further.
‘‘Every council is currently scrambling to respond to the [the national policy statement] all at the same time. All of them are going to have slightly different interpretations and then they’ll all be going to go to the Environment Court.’’