CBD losing pull as jobs heartland
Nine fringe areas of Auckland taking over in intensification of both work and homes
The idea that intensification is concentrated close to the central city has been debunked by new research from Auckland Council.
While the city centre and fringe areas provide plenty of jobs and the greatest housing density, more intensification is happening in nine other job-rich areas.
This is backed up by housing consents which show 41 per cent of the 86,094 new homes consented between 2016 and 2021 were within 2km of the nine areas and nine per cent within the central city and fringe areas.
The nine areas are: Auckland Airport precinct; Albany/North Harbour; East Tamaki/Botany Junction; Ellerslie Office Park; Manukau/Wiri; Onehunga/Penrose/Sylvia Park/Mt Wellington/Ōtāhuhu; Rosebank Peninsula; Takapuna, including Smales Farm and North Shore Hospital; and Wairau Valley.
The research paper, from the chief planning office for planning committee members, said there has been criticism that the majority of new homes are not in areas close to the city centre but happening further out.
This is valid as the city centre and fringe does provide jobs, services and amenities but the city also houses multiple large employment areas and commercial centres for different jobs, such as manufacturing and logistics, the planners said.
The nine areas account for about 57 per cent of the city’s total jobs, the paper said.
The research paper started from the point of the Unitary Plan coming into force in 2016 with provision for 900,000 new homes.
From 2016 until 2021, a total of 86,074 new homes — apartments, townhouses and standalone houses — were consented. The top five areas by Local Board area were Henderson-Massey, Hibiscus and Bays, Howick, Pakuranga and Upper Harbour.
Over the five-year period, Auckland’s population grew by 125,800.
Planning committee chairman Chris Darby said he understood how people get fixated with the central city as the major employment anchor with its universities and tourism.
“But what this research highlights is there are at least nine other key employment zones being recognised by the development community and ultimately by buyers telling them where to develop,” he said.
Darby said the city centre has a lot of important white-collar, high paying jobs, but there is a broader range of jobs in the nine centres.
“Auckland Council has always had in mind the city centre is important, but 1.7 million Aucklanders spread over a large area need numerous areas of employment and we have planned for that.
“Covid has impacted the city centre disproportionately. In some ways, the market has been smart enough to recognise that employment elsewhere is vitally important and providing housing in proximity.
“In this Covid world, maybe that’s a good thing. We are not all eggs in the city centre basket,” Darby said.
Asked if he thought the Government’s recent law changes to increase intensification across Auckland would distort the Unitary Plan process, Darby said the market is savvier than people think.
In a landmark report, the Infrastructure Commission has recommended measuring emissions from infrastructure building and use, pricing water, pricing congestion, allowing more borrowing from fewer sources and looking at whether we need to even build all that infrastructure.
New Zealand has a huge infrastructure deficit between what we need and what we have, and Auckland is in the eye of the storm.
Two-thirds of New Zealand’s population growth in the next 30 years is going to occur on 3 per cent of the country’s land area. Half the total growth will be in Auckland. This could create huge problems, and make existing issues worse. But you already knew that: Sitting in traffic, waiting too long at a bus stop, watching sewage leak into the streets, sitting in an overcrowded hospital, sending your child to a cold school. New Zealand doesn’t have the infrastructure it needs now, or what it will need in the future.
There have been many figures floated on how much it would cost to plug the gap. The commission yesterday floated another number: Spending 9.6 per cent of GDP each year over the next 30 years, or about $31 billion a year. That’s more or less impossible; it would require doubling the current infrastructure spend, and funnelling one in every $10 of our GDP into building new infrastructure.
Both the commission and Infrastructure Minister Grant Robertson have their doubts that New Zealand even has the capacity to build that much, even if the Government could afford it. Dropping billions of dollars into infrastructure projects that cannot be delivered will just fuel inflation. That’s why the commission and the Government both said yesterday that New Zealand cannot build itself out of an infrastructure hole.
In Robertson’s words, this “means we need to get more from the infrastructure we do build, reducing costs and prioritising for the greatest impact”.
The commission recommended repurposing existing infrastructure to ease the pressure on always building something new. It went so far as to recommend the Government considers repurposing existing infrastructure first, before it decided to build anything new.
Infrastructure has been a problem for decades. We tend to build too little, and what we build is not always suited to our needs. In the last term of government, Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones established the Infrastructure Commission, which was supported by parties from across the house.
The commission works similarly to New Zealand’s zero carbon legislation. Every five years, the commission is required to put together an infrastructure strategy setting out what New Zealand needs and how it might get there. This is tabled in Parliament.
Within six months of this, the Government is required to set out its response to those recommendations. The idea is that instead of constantly thinking in the short term, governments and political parties from across the spectrum take a more longterm view (one that exists outside the political cycle) of what New Zealand needs, and how to build the workforce, skills, supply chains, and funding mechanisms to build it. The report yesterday is the first part of the strategy, and Robertson will be required to respond to it by September.
The commission’s strategy made 68 recommendations in five key areas: Enabling a netzero carbon emissions Aotearoa; helping towns and regions to flourish; building attractive and inclusive cities; strengthening resilience to shocks and stresses, and moving to a circular economy.
It said the Government should require that “infrastructure policies and strategic plans take into account, where feasible, their implications for locking in carbon emissions”. This would likely mean that were the Government to want to build a road, it would have to analyse how that road would “lock in” emissions from more driving, making it hard to make the case for building that road. The commission said business cases should have to include “whole-of-life carbon emissions, including embodied, enabled and operational emissions”.
The cumulative effect suggests it could be almost impossible to get many current infrastructure projects built (even Auckland’s planned light rail line has massive construction emissions). This is, in some cases, the point: The commission said the Government should do an analysis of “non-built” solutions to any infrastructure problems, which would look at whether to repurpose existing infrastructure instead.