Can the minister stare down National-voting Nimbys?
Good political speeches in Aotearoa are as rare as takahē sightings in the Murchison Mountains, but Housing Minister Chris Bishop’s to the Wellington Chamber of Commerce on the Government’s housing policy counts as one of them.
Using a mix of reasoned argument and passionate emotion, Bishop set the scene on Aotearoa’s housing problems; social, transitional and emergency housing was costing the country the equivalent of 15 Transmission Gully motorways every four years.
The answer to reducing the $5-billiona-year cost of housing subsidies was both carrot and stick. There would be more greenfield development but councils could opt out of medium-density residential standards (MDRS), that allow for homes up to three storeys on most sites without a consent, but only if they earmark 30 years’ worth of land for housing development.
What’s more, he dangled the adoption of an ACT policy which would give councils back 50% of the GST from the construction of new houses, which ACT estimated would cost $1b a year.
Bishop’s speech was notable, not only for his unabashed urbanist view – until now relatively rare in a National Party politician – but because those views pit him against the heartland of his own party.
That tension is most closely seen in the meandering path the MDRS have taken in recent years. In 2021 National’s thenleader Judith Collins signed a bipartisan deal with Labour specifying that the MDRS would not require resource consent on up to three dwellings, up to three storeys, on all residential land across the country’s main cities. In May 2023 new party leader Christopher Luxon scuttled the plan in an appeal to National’s voting base.
And therein lies the issue Bishop is forced to wrestle with; he may hope his proposed changes will attract a breed of newer, younger homeowners to National’s voting ranks, but he faces alienating older voters in the leafy suburbs for whom the status quo is sacrosanct.
There are also serious questions about Bishop’s ability to ensure councils comply with his housing density rules when it’s the leafy suburbs voters who have the most to lose, and complain the hardest. Meanwhile, the next generation quietly accept that they’ll never be able to afford to buy a house.
That kind of resistance is neatly encapsulated in the first report of the independent hearings panel for Wellington’s new District Plan, which concluded that “enabling intensification does not, of itself, improve or even address affordability”. It comes from economist Dr Tim Helm, an expert witness on several Wellington residents’ associations, and runs counter to all other economists’ views that upzoning improves housing affordability.
By using Helm to inform its own position, the panel ignored its own evidence on the Auckland Unitary Plan, that upzoning had increased housing supply and reduced prices. As well, three studies found that Auckland’s upzoning, through the AUP, caused housing supply to increase and prices to fall.
Bishop clearly has the housing panel’s anti-housing views in his sights. During Wednesday’s speech he announced that he would hold the final right of appeal on district planning changes where councils and independent hearings panels do not agree, or on any requests for timeframe extensions, as the Minister Responsible for RMA Reform.
The minister is right to point out the differentials of artificial supply constraints due to restricted zoning among councils and the uncertainty that resource consents bring, but as Labour contests, his opt-in, opt-out MDRS proposal doesn’t guarantee that more houses will be built. Equally, a council could opt out of a 30-year plan just as it earlier opted in, despite its ratification.
The fact that Wellington’s independent housing panel has been plain anti-housing as it proposes to strip back capacity and expand character areas proves it. If Wellington City Council doesn’t accept the panel’s recommendations at its District Plan meeting on March 14 and he is presented as the final right of appeal, will Bishop have the courage to stare down his own voters who have been loudly advocating for those character areas?
He’s right when he says the country’s housing crisis “is a moral issue”. What’s less clear is whether his solution to the housing problem will be enough to free up land supply fast enough so that a generation isn’t left out of homeownership.
Standing in the way of this ardent Yimby (Yes, in my backyard) is a legion of Nimbys (Not in my backyard), many of them National-supporting Boomers whose wealth can be attributed to their houses consistently earning more each year than their annual salaries.
If he is to succeed, he must ignore their cries of protest and continue with his plan to ensure enough urban land is freed up in the nation’s cities so that, eventually, prices fall. If he fails, the exodus of the young leaving our shores will continue unabated. Between success and failure lies a generational divide and a terrible status quo.