They may not have wanted more housing. In fact, they tried every trick in the book to prevent it. But in the end, Wellington wouldn’t have passed such a pro-housing plan without them, writes Hayden Donnell.
The sound of backslapping could be heard for miles around following Wellington City Council’s decision to pass the country’s most progressive District Plan last week. Housing advocates were loud and generous in their praise. They singled out Wharangi ward councillor Rebecca Matthews for reaching the zenith of her multi-year effort to legalise apartments in Wellington. Urban economists from across the political spectrum, from bike-loving Brisbanite Stu Donovan to NZ Initiative SUV defender Eric Crampton were acknowledged. Even The Spinoff’s Joel MacManus received a degree of credit for going against the urging of his more learned colleagues and trying to take a defibrillator to the capital’s mouldy, draughty villa-shaped heart.
Somehow in this orgiastic frenzy of congratulation, perhaps the most integral contributors to Wellington’s housing future have gone virtually unremarked. They’ve been left out of the discussion, only mentioned in terms of derision, or with the shudder and a backward glance.
They deserve more credit, because this District Plan wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of the planners and lawyers on Wellington’s independent hearings panel. Their report on the future of housing in Wellington is in some ways a typical missive from the urban planning class that has long held our cities in a low-density stranglehold. It issues from a familiar negative starting point, asking submitters to prove why housing should be allowed rather than why it shouldn’t, before uncovering every byzantine rule or reason to yam townhouses into the void.
That’s in line with standard operating practice for council planning and consenting departments across the country. In Auckland, planners hallucinated heritage trams as they fought to protect a rotting dairy hated by its own neighbours, while at the same time trying to stop a new dairy from opening in a growing suburb because people might cross the road for sour coke lollies. Even though the city has been praised and defended for its upzoning efforts, its council has kept a large percentage of its most desirable, accessible land as a museum of heavily renovated villas.
Most of the time planners get away with these moves thanks to the support of councillors and monied homeowners, and Wellington’s panellists were likely confident they could do the same.
But just like the dwarves at Moria, they delved too greedily and too deep. They airily dismissed the entire basis for the law they were meant to enforce, arguing upzoning won’t increase housing supply or affordability. They placed heritage protections on a rusting gas tank. They spent thousands of words explaining why a train shouldn’t qualify as a train. They seemed to assert demolishing old villas was worse for carbon emissions than urban sprawl. They rejected empirical studies and data while accepting the findings of a rogue economist who linked to his own blog posts as evidence because he “appeared credible”. They refused to believe that people would walk uphill. They actively misrepresented people’s testimony, failed to declare conflicts of interest and defined rules for what constituted evidence so narrowly that even the government ministry responsible for housing and urban development couldn’t adhere to them.
If the IHP report had been even 30% less poorly reasoned and 20% more progressive, the council would likely have just accepted it. Instead, it provoked a bipartisan, multidisciplinary backlash unrivalled in recent memory. It was trashed by the Infrastructure Commission, the Green Party, the NZ Initiative and a City for People. Even Act, a party with a housing policy that stops working after a city’s population exceeds two, said that it defied economic sense.
The blowback provided perfect political cover for council housing advocates who wanted to completely overhaul the IHP’s recommendations. Matthews says the IHP report was untenable and councillors had no option but to make amendments. “There were significant issues in their approach to evidence, reasoning and recommendations that could not be left unanswered.”
Takapū/Northern Ward councillor Ben McNulty, another leading pro-housing voice at council, says he was caught off-guard by the IHP brushing aside the relationship between housing supply and demand, mischaracterising evidence, and arguing that urban intensification has “downside risks”. The commissioners’ attempts to explain their reasoning in later hearings and reports “did little to build confidence”. “With these factors in mind, it was clear to the majority of councillors that on the substantive issues of the District Plan, common sense had gone out the window. For the basis of a planning system that will last decades, this was simply not acceptable,” he says.
Despite The Post editor Tracy Watkins’ assertion that “informed debate probably played second fiddle” in the resulting council discussion on adopting the IHP’s recommendations, anyone who actually watched the process play out would know housing advocates had the facts on their side. By the end, their opponents were reduced to flailing helplessly about how they’d overheard a radio broadcasting in the language of an “underprivileged” group in the bathroom next door.
The Wellington District Plan passed at the conclusion of that debate is almost the opposite of what the IHP panellists wanted. But without their legally dubious overreach, it’s doubtful pro-housing councillors could have achieved so much. In delivering the worst plan the city could have possibly hoped for, they helped pave the way for the best. We owe them a debt of thanks.