High anxiety over medium density
Plans for a seven-townhouse development in the Wellington suburb of Seatoun have residents worried that the Kiwi dream of backyard cricket and barbecues is under threat. reports.
Rob Mitchell
The homeowner who sits on the deck and worries aboutwhat’s happening to the neighbourhood beyond his hedge.
The new chief city planner struggling to find a home and tasked with helping others to find theirs.
The developer spurred on by a historic lack of supply and rising prices to seek opportunities in suburbs previously beyond his view.
All have been drawn into a building drama over the future of Wellington City and region, and the conflicting aspirations of those living in it.
Iain Macleod remembers the games of cricket he played as a child in his generous backyard, the matches that would end with the ball hoisted over the neighbour’s fence, and the sense of community that grew in every victory and defeat.
He wanted the same for his own children. That’s why he bought a large home on a quarteracre section in Seatoun. A suburb of large homes on even larger sections.
And that’s why he’s nervously eyeing the ‘‘sold’’ sign on the house across the road on Inglis St.
Developer Kurt Gibbons has bought the house, an attractive 300-square-metre abode set on a 1012sqm section that had been a family home for decades.
He plans to knock it down and build seven townhouses. The resource consent application is before Wellington City Council.
It’s one of 53 applications the council has considered in 2020. That’s a big jump from the 32 that were filed in 2015, but slightly down on last year’s 58.
There has been a similar surge around the country. StatsNZ figures show building plans for 10,000 new apartments and townhouseswere approved in the year to August, almost 10 times the number of eight years before.
That has Macleod and others worried and getting worked-up. Their suburb has been spared the major changes proposed in the Wellington City Council’s spatial plan, but not the predations of developers seeking good, flat sites
for townhouses and intensification.
‘‘If this goes through itwill take every big section in Seatoun ... they would be fair game for the developers,’’ said Macleod, saying he had counted at least 18 quarter-acre sections.
He sees pepper pots of poor townhouse design destroying the look and feel of a suburb dominated by large, expensive bungalows and villas.
Not In My Backyard? Hell, yes. ‘‘If thatmakesme a Nimby, call me aNimby then,’’ Macleod said. ‘‘Seatoun is a higher-decile suburb with some nice facilities, it doesn’t suit the high-density development.’’
Higher-intensity housing would change the nature of the suburb, he said.
He’s not alone in his own community and elsewhere.
In Lower Hutt, Dennis Page has seen enough of Hutt City Council’s plans for infill housing and intensification to help solve its own accommodation crisis.
He’s heading for the hills and thewider, more open spaces of theWairarapa.
Des Darby will consider that too, if the two-storey houses next to his Lower Hutt home become three-storey sun-stealers under the council’s plans for the Medium Density Residential Zone within its Plan Change 43.
That plan envisages three
storey buildings up to 10 metres high in the city’s urban centre, with shops and cafes on the ground floor and apartments above.
But it would also allow greater intensification in many of the suburbs surrounding the CBD, and particularly on residential sites larger than 1400sqm.
‘‘I do not want a three-storey house built next to me,’’ said Darby.
Like Macleod, he admits to ‘‘nimbyism and selfishness’’ in the face of a housing crisis, unprecedented queues at the region’s open homes, and ‘‘no vacancy’’ signs in its emergencyhousing hotels.
‘‘But it doesn’t make me wrong,’’ he said. ‘‘People with kids, they want a bit of lawn, they want a bit of backyard, want a bit of vegetable garden to train the
kids about where food comes from.’’ That lifestylewas now ‘‘under threat’’.
Developer Gibbons understands the growing anxiety. He has close to 30 projects on the go around the country, including a dozen in Wellington. Half of them are residentialmulti-units.
And one of those, on Seatoun Heights, has been the target of angry socialmedia posts. ‘‘There is nimbyism out there ... comes from people just not knowing.’’
Some were just ‘‘antidevelopment’’ but others were more reasonable. ‘‘A lot of the time I’ll get a call from a neighbour afterwards saying they actually look really good and nowhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be.’’
Gibbons has some sympathy for people caught out by changes to residential zoning.
‘‘If they don’t want to be in a dense area, theymay have to sell. I’ve got sympathy for that but I have evenmore sympathy for peoplewho can’t get into housing because there’s not enough land for it.’’
People like Liam Hodgetts. Wellington’s new chief planning officer has been in the job barely three months but he already has a strong sense of the issues facing the region.
Like so many others, he is struggling to find a family home after moving from New Plymouth.
And he says the quarter-acre section will remain just as elusive as the city evolves and planners try to make room for his family and thousands of others over the next couple of decades.
‘‘The city is ... a very attractive part of the world, to a degree these suburbs are victims of their own success – beautiful treed environments with the coast ... and attractive to the development industry that wants to make housing happen.’’
The capital was at a crossroads ‘‘where the tension between a city needing to grow and supply more housing is butting up againstwhat makes the city special’’.
‘‘It’s not wanting to disrupt communities to the extent that you lose hope, but at the same time allow the city to grow, to hold on to the essence that is unique toWellington, and the communities and the suburbs and various sectors that have their own particular sense of place.’’
He said Seatoun didn’t have any protections as a ‘‘neighbourhood character area’’.
‘‘But if they believe their area is of a particular character and nature that is worthy of some form of design guidelines ... then the right place to do it is to make a submission to the district plan process.’’
The quarter-acre ‘‘dream’’ wasn’t dead, said Hodgetts. ‘‘New Zealand is not going to stop producing quarter-acres, it just may not be in Wellington, because we don’t have any room.’’