Auckland’s grumbling inner suburbs got the housing cuts they wanted. They may be disappointed by what comes next.
The last time Chris Bishop had to U-turn on his party’s housing commitments, he sold it as an upgrade. Yes, National was torpedoing the bipartisan townhouse bill that would have allowed three houses of up to three storeys on most sections, he told Q&A’s Jack Tame in 2023. But it was replacing it with new legislation that would legalise similar amounts of housing, only with extra flexibility for councils on where it goes. “We’ve always said we were open to sensible changes and what we’ve come up with, I think, is a far more ambitious package,” he insisted.
The response was, to put it euphemistically, sceptical. But Bishop was mostly vindicated. Wellington and Christchurch passed ambitious housing plans under his new rules. In Auckland, the council used the flexibility National offered to reduce housing capacity on flood plains and put it closer to train stations and bus routes in its proposed zoning document, Plan Change 120.
In his speech to the Committee for Auckland at the New Zealand International Convention Centre on Thursday, Bishop couldn’t muster the same brave face. He was there to announce another last-minute housing backtrack and this time there was no getting around it, it was a downgrade. He was scaling Plan Change 120 back to allow fewer houses. It had enabled two million. He was allowing the council to take that down to 1.6 million.
The changes were a concession to a protest campaign Bishop had rubbished repeatedly. He’d tried to explain that enabling two million homes wasn’t the same as building them, that the figure would only be reached in the astronomically unlikely event of every section in the city being developed to its maximum capacity, but the discontent kept growing. “The idea that a plan change that enables two million homes is suddenly going to result in two million homes being built in the short term is, frankly, nuts,” he wrote desperately in a Herald op-ed in September.
Unfortunately for him, it turned out some of the nutters were stationed around the cabinet table. Prime minister Christopher Luxon, egged on by Pakuranga’s Simeon Brown and Epsom’s David Seymour, insisted Bishop cut the two million capacity figure in deference to the howls of anguish that could still be heard emanating day and night out of public meetings in Parnell and Botany.
On Thursday, Bishop oscillated between snippy and reflective over what Labour described as his “humiliating backdown”. Asked by TVNZ reporter turned Infrastructure NZ engagement manager Katie Bradford why misinformation around the two million figure had been so pervasive, he sniped “I don’t know, you used to be in the media, you know more than I do”. At a media standup a few minutes later, he was more conciliatory. “Politics is always all about compromise on the way through, and this is a good step forward,” he noted, as Auckland mayor Wayne Brown watched on from among the reporters like a perched vulture. “It’s a more politically sustainable plan, and that is important.”
If Bishop was philosophical about the change, it may have been because he secretly thought he had his opponents snookered again. Despite cutting the housing capacity across Auckland as a whole, he’d kept in place rules requiring council to focus its upzoning around train stations and town centres. The places with the best infrastructure would still be the first priority for housing.
Unfortunately for some of the loudest voices protesting Plan Change 120, that’s exactly where they live. Epsom is home to four train stations. Mt Eden has a huge new City Rail Link station. Kingsland has rapid bus routes and a train station. St Mary’s Bay is within the walking catchment of the city centre. So are parts of Ponsonby. Auckland Council can’t just build a massive garbage compactor to keep compressing human bodies into Te Atatū peninsula. Even under this new, watered down plan, it’s going to have to put houses in the richer suburbs it’s previously shielded from development through innovative, legally questionable planning practices.
Perhaps realising this, Epsom MP David Seymour sent out a press release during Bishop’s speech insisting the council would have to give cabinet an outline of where it’s going to put its 1.6 million houses before any law changes are passed. Wayne Brown was having none of it. Speaking to The Spinoff after Bishop’s speech, he said he’d rather just keep the existing plan than submit a new one to be signed off by “a bunch of turkeys that don’t live in Auckland”. “I’m not interested in doing that. We’ll just stick with the two million houses,” he said, before adding a barb for Seymour. “Most of those will be in Epsom.”
Brown could later be heard loudly calling the Act leader an unrepeatable epithet on the footpath outside the convention centre. His idea of turning Epsom into Shanghai may have been a joke, but there was some substance at its heart. The mayor was insistent that, even if the council ends up reducing the capacity in Plan Change 120 down from two million houses, he wasn’t going to be taking that out of the inner suburbs where the council has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on water infrastructure and transport connections. “That’s where we’ve got everything,” he explained, with a note of exasperation in his voice. His planning committee chair Richard Hills reiterated that later. “The plan was built on your proximity to things like jobs, transport and infrastructure,” he said. “Based on the plan we built, you’d have to work backwards and start with reducing capacity in the outer suburbs where it makes less sense to have density.”
If Hills had to guess, that means places like Howick, Pakuranga and parts of west Auckland will lose some development capacity. It’s less likely to mean the complaining masses filling up halls in Parnell will be able to avoid having to look at an apartment. Yesterday’s announcement was a hollow victory for those Epsomites. They helped get rid of the big bad scary number, two million. But as Bishop kept trying to tell them, that number wasn’t real. What matters more is where development is allowed, and as things stand, it’s still set to be allowed in their backyard.
