Another week, another reduction to Auckland’s housing targets – exposing deep disagreements about what the city actually needs, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.
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Another retreat
The Spinoff’s Hayden Donnell broke the news on Tuesday: cabinet has agreed to lower Auckland’s minimum housing capacity target from 1.6 million to 1.4 million homes – the second reduction in six weeks, having started at two million. Bishop confirmed the revision to Auckland’s Plan Change 120 in a statement released after Donnell’s story was published, saying he expected the revision to “finally bring consensus on this important issue. Aucklanders deserve certainty on this city-shaping plan change.”
As Amelia Wade and Jonathan Killick report in The Post, the existing Unitary Plan already allows for around 1.2 million homes, meaning three-quarters of the additional capacity that would have been enabled under the original plan has now been removed. Bishop’s caveat is that the council will likely have to zone for 1.6 million anyway due to mandatory requirements under other planning legislation, a position that prompted councillor Richard Hills to ask what the point of the exercise was, “other than political messaging from parts of the Cabinet”.
Done over by Act
Mayor Wayne Brown is blunt about who he holds responsible: “Bishop’s been done over by his own party and Act.” David Seymour’s explanation is that he changed his mind after the council walked back plans to put several hundred thousand of the proposed homes in greenfield developments rather than the central suburbs.
Brown says it’s typical behaviour from Act.“They don’t want any concerts in Auckland. They don’t want any sports events because they’re opposing the bed night levy. They don’t want people living intensively. They want us all to live in tents in Maungaturoto.”
Stop the meddling, says Ockham boss
Among all the players in this debate, Mark Todd is an unusual figure. The co-founder of apartment developer Ockham is a passionate density advocate who has grown frustrated with the arguments over PC120. Ockham has just laid off 10 of its 27 staff, with Todd telling BusinessDesk’s Maria Slade (paywalled) the pre-sales market has been “effectively non-existent for close to four years now”. Just 16 apartments were sold off-plan across the entire city in the last quarter of 2025, down from around 700 per quarter during the mid-2010s peak.
Speaking to Slade again this week (paywalled), Todd says it was clear the 2016 Unitary Plan had authorised enough capacity, even before the current downturn. He uses his 10-storey Greenhouse building, in an area of Ponsonby rezoned for that height in 2016, to illustrate his point: “How many tall buildings have been built there in the last 10 years? One.” The existing capacity surplus makes the government’s ongoing interference even more frustrating, he says. “All the success in Auckland housing is despite the meddling from Wellington.”
Rewarding the Nimbys
Greater Auckland’s Connor Sharp, writing in the Sunday Star-Times, takes the opposite view. With housing and transport the two biggest household expenses in the city, PC120 is primarily a cost-of-living issue, Sharp argues, and he finds it “galling to see senior politicians (and coincidentally property-owners) like Christopher Luxon, Simeon Brown and David Seymour vehemently opposing the plan”.
The headline cuts from two million to 1.6 million (and now to 1.4 million) are largely symbolic, he says. The more serious problem is the signal each retreat sends: “it rewards NIMBY groups and councillors to keep scaremongering about PC120.” Yet he agrees with Todd on at least one topic: the pointlessness of most of the government’s interventions.“We need less chaos and interference, so we can finally see some progress.”
