Over the decades, Mike Fox has witnessed the housing market progressively tilt towards larger, more expensive homes. Without a major overhaul of the current regulatory processes, he says, things will never change.

It’s one of the biggest problems our country faces – we cannot produce the affordable housing that’s so desperately needed. But we can produce an overabundance of expensive homes. So why the massive disconnect between demand and supply?

Without political ownership and a major overhaul of the current regulatory processes, affordable housing will never be delivered. 

Over four decades, I’ve built hundreds of homes, and have watched the market progressively tilt towards larger homes on smaller, very expensive lots, with building timeframes stretching out and productivity plummeting. 

Unfortunately, this is what our current system and market dictates, but it woefully under-delivers on what we need to house everyone, especially in the dawning era where affordability is paramount. 

The current government’s worthy political aspirations to ramp up affordable housing by 10,000 units per annum under the guise of Kiwibuild crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. They soon realised what those of us in the industry have long known – the delivery system is broken. It’s plagued with hurdles, delays, costs at every turn and is inadvertently skewed to only create high-cost land and subsequently high-cost homes. 

It’s a pipe dream to think that the current system or market will produce affordable housing without intervention, especially in urban areas. 

The sad thing is that the government’s response to fixing the broken system is to change the law so that government projects can sidestep the Resource Management Act (RMA), but leave the rest of the country stuck in the regulatory mire. Why not be brave and fix the problem for everyone, once and for all? Instead, it’s an opportunity lost and the problem kicked down the road because it’s politically difficult. 

In New Zealand, we’ve been building a disproportionate oversupply of expensive larger homes with the greatest area of demand – affordable homes, hardly catered for. This needs to change, and quickly. However, if we continue to follow the same regulatory processes, how can we expect a different outcome? It just won’t happen. 

If we want affordable housing, we need to produce affordable land free of inflationary minimum-size and design-restrictive covenants. 

In reality, these covenants are put in place by developers to raise the price of subsequent section releases. They cut out a large portion of buyers who might be wanting a smaller, more efficient home. Any meaningful changes will come about under current systems only by sidestepping the market and some of the feel-good niceties of planning and simply getting on with pragmatically producing the housing, and centrally funding the infrastructure needed. 

If the politicians have not got the wisdom or courage to change the rules that have created this mess, perhaps they should develop their own land that can be used for affordable housing. Previous governments have successfully done it before. 

The solution is relatively clear – we need fewer rules and more political fortitude as local authorities will need to be curbed and in some cases, overruled, and not just for government projects. 

Take one private enterprise example where a smaller local authority has been sitting on its hands for more than 12 months. It’s a $40m project that will deliver 150 affordable homes to market for less than $400k each, including the land. Clients are crying out for the product, but two star-gazing planners just seem overwhelmed, and the project continues to sit in limbo. 

The planners’ strategy seems to be to go slow with the hope the project will eventually disappear. How unjust is that on society? Affordable new homes being kept out of the market on the whim of a planner. All the while, holding costs are pushing up prices by the day and the clients remain unhoused in motels and cars. 

Another example is a transitional housing project, with a perfect site and location and the need overwhelming. This time, the neighbours got a bit jittery, politicians circled, didn’t like the heat and the project was canned, resulting in more motel rooms booked. 

God only knows what all this is costing the taxpayer. This is the crazy, disconnected world the RMA creates. If they asked me, I would remove all smaller residential projects from the RMA as it is no longer fit for purpose and the planning process is too subjective – often highjacked by neighbours, anti-commercial practices, personal agendas and nimbyism. 

More standardisation of design and modular building needs to be increased and the consumer conditioned to not expect a bespoke home if they want affordability and value. 

Building companies create the expectation that you can have your home any way you want. However, if the consumer realised that building bespoke added at least 25% to the cost of their home, they may view things very differently. This is even more important now, when people will be cutting their cloth accordingly and looking for homes within their means that deliver efficiency on all fronts. 

The social and health costs from not getting more affordable housing into the market far outweigh the cost of providing good housing. All these people forced to live in motels, cars and caravans need a stable, warm place to call home. 

Although well intentioned, the RMA has morphed into a major stumbling block. It’s project specific and has no consideration as to what the community actually needs to house its people or what its impacts are on the financial viability of a project. 

It is heavily weighted against the party wanting to do a new project. The applicant is made to feel guilty until they can prove themselves innocent. The surrounding homes seem to have an inordinate amount of say and councils often pander to spurious objections. 

It’s a cost-plus model with the first person purchasing paying the bill for infrastructure, GST and all manner of other local council fees. The RMA, along with the 70-disjointed individual council district schemes, is an unsustainable model. 

In addition to issues caused by the RMA, since the introduction of the Building Act 2004, construction costs have soared, and productivity has plummeted. 

Why? Considerable administrative process has cumulatively been forced into place, but it adds very little material value. Risk-averse behaviour has turned once helpful local councils into gun-shy, chicken-little organisations slowing construction down and demanding consumer money be spent to absolve themselves of liability. 

The construction industry currently can work only at the speed that the controlling local council can issue and administer consents, and that impacts significantly on productivity and costs. Some local councils are brilliant, others are woeful, and I know in some locations you can wait as long as 21 days for an inspection. How can anyone be expected to be productive or work within constraints like that? 

In the last 15 years, the cost of building has increased 110% while the general cost of living has increased only 44%. Much of this extra cost is the result of compounding regulatory change, council fees and unfairly imposed infrastructure cost. 

Many good operators have been worn down by the incessant regulatory creep and the growing army of Clipboard Charlies. They are exiting and taking much-needed skills away from the industry. 

We need strong leadership, meaningful change and a complete overhaul of the RMA, the Building Act and the Local Government Act so that the drivers and outcomes result in efficient, affordable and sustainable housing. 

Change will happen only through collaboration between industry and policymakers, but there must be a catalyst for change. I believe we have reached that tipping point. One would also hope housing can be depoliticised and an across-party accord could be reached. 

Housing is too important an issue to be used as a political football. Recent events have opened the gates of pragmatism and we should take this opportunity to improve things for the industry and the people of New Zealand. A full review of the governing acts should be undertaken, and if regulation doesn’t help the delivery of affordable healthy housing or make the industry more productive, the time has come to ditch it. 

Mike Fox is co-founding director of EasyBuild House Packs. An extended version of this article originally appeared in June 2020 issue of Building Today.

They might sound like the same thing, but light rail is quite different from light metro – the system that transport minister Phil Twyford now favours for Auckland. Katy Wakefield and  Emma McInnes of Women in Urbanism explain why the metro option is a poor substitute for LRT.

Transport is a feminist issue. The issue of how we move around our cities and towns is a feminist issue. Women have complex daily lives, more so than men. This is a well-researched fact, the world over.

The reason for this is largely because work is still extremely gendered. Women still have more to juggle in a day – including employment, household work and caregiving for the young and the old. Women do 75% of the world’s unpaid care work, according to Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women, and this has an impact on their travel needs. Women tend to make different trips and journeys than men during the day. They also have different mobility needs. Despite that, we live in a world where the trips women make are overlooked in the world of transport planning. We live in a world that isn’t designed for women at all.

Here’s a transport-specific example: women globally, and locally, are more likely to walk and take public transport than men. Men are more likely to drive than women, and if a household owns a car, it is the man who predominantly has access to the vehicle. Yet we have inconsistent and dangerous walking and public transport networks, but a world-class road system for cars. We invest more in our road network than the modes of transport used mostly by women.

Men are more likely to have a simple daily travel routine, a twice-daily commute in and out of town. Women’s travel is more complex. Women more often “trip chain” – follow a travel pattern of small interconnected trips, such as dropping the kids off at school, getting the groceries, going to work, and taking an elderly relative to the doctor. Yet we don’t have public transport systems that can withstand this complex pattern of travel.

Women are also less happy to travel after dark in unlit, unmaintained areas, devoid of other humans. It’s easy to see why, given that women in Aotearoa regularly report distressing levels of harassment and feeling unsafe in public spaces.

All this leads us to the decision on what light rail will look like in Auckland’s future.

Light rail had been planned for Dominion Road several years ago, and was due to be built before 2021. However in the meantime, another option was tabled – light metro, which the government began to consider alongside the light rail option. With a new election cycle beginning soon, we believe it is critical to make the case for light rail.

Read: A blame guide for the Auckland light rail cluster-shemozzle uber-bungle

The future connection from Māngere to Queen Street needs foremost to be about connecting communities, not just about speed from the city to the airport. Men have a tendency to design the tallest, fastest, most expensive and most phallic infrastructure. We want public transport that looks after the needs of the mum in Mount Roskill who wants to be able to get to childcare and then work in Onehunga. Or to help the student in Māngere to get to university in the city.

LRT is light rail that runs right along the street, like a tram. Light metro either runs underground, or is elevated above the street.

Here’s why the former works better for Auckland:

Accessibility

Because LRT runs at street level, access is easy and quick for everyone, including those with different mobility needs. There are no lifts or stairs – you just hop on board. Light metro, however, requires people to travel up or down to stations, relying on the use of (working) lifts and stairs. This adds time and complexity to journeys.

Light metro also has fewer stops along the way, favouring saving time over being accessible to more people. Street level LRT allows for more stops along the line to serve a wider catchment of people, especially along the Dominion Road corridor. LRT allows stops to be located in the right places to suit the neighbourhoods it runs through (the middle of town and village centres, near convenient walking connections and side street links, for example), rather than the stations needing to be located where it is feasible to build them – which is often the wrong place for users.

Convenient access to key destinations on the line is particularly beneficial for women, who “trip chain” more often than men.

Personal safety

Getting on and off LRT at street level means there are more eyes on the street around you at all times, which counts especially after dark and especially for women who need to be and feel safe to benefit from public transport.

​​Light metro means waiting at lonely station platforms; access relies on lifts and stairwells, and potentially over- and underpasses, which can be isolated places at night.

Light metro also requires lifts, CCTV and lighting to be maintained and kept in working order – working lifts in particular are vital for pushchair and wheelchair users. For light metro to operate accessibly, these maintenance costs need to remain a priority in every budget, whatever the political and economic climate.

Cost

LRT is not only cheaper and faster to build, it requires hardly any station maintenance – since there aren’t any stations to begin with. An LRT line could be built from Māngere to Queen Street plus another line in the northwest, for far less money than one metro line from Māngere to Queen Street. Metro is three times the cost of LRT, so we get only one third as much for the same money (or residents end up paying three times as much for about the same thing through rates, taxes or user charges).

Local business

Light rail increases the number of people walking on the street. That improves walkers’ personal safety, which in turn attracts more people. More foot traffic – along with the peace and fresh air of low-congestion streets – helps create an environment where businesses can thrive. Light metro, on the other hand, requires passengers to wait for trains away from shops, on elevated or underground platforms. It leaves the street dominated by traffic (and potentially by ugly infrastructure) and creates a far less inviting, customer-friendly streetscape.

Streets and homes

There is this strange idea out there that a metro that is elevated, trenched or tunnelled is somehow less impactful because it’s not running on the street. In fact it’s far more damaging than street level LRT. For example, in all light metro scenarios, houses and businesses along Dominion Road would have to be demolished to make way for an overpass or underpass.

Dominion Road is the flattest, straightest north-south route through the heart of the Auckland isthmus. It’s lined with shops and businesses and schools. It’s a historic tram route. Add LRT and bike-scoot lanes, and it would become Auckland’s great green artery through the most densely populated suburbs, connecting old Auckland to south Auckland, and both to the central city. It’s a great route to run 21st century transport along.

Auckland was originally planned around tram lines, and once had an incredibly comprehensive tram network that covered most of the city. The city is perfectly suited to street-level light rail. We still have the wide arterials that were designed for trams; after Dominion Road, more lines could continue to be added in the future.

Public transport is for much more than making niche city-to-airport trips. It’s for the people, and a people’s public transport route has to serve all kinds. We don’t need ultra-expensive infrastructure with a view of the clouds. We need infrastructure that works for everyday people, trying to make everyday sustainable trips. To do this, we need to start to listen to the voices not heard in our planning process, and start designing an equitable world that is actually inclusive of everyone.

Women in Urbanism Aotearoa is currently running a campaign for a more equitable street level light rail option. Sign the petition here.