Urban Development Authority for Auckland Overriding or Undermining the Unitary Plan and planning?

The Unitary Plan has over $100 million of investment from the private sector. Overall investment to write the plan including the hearings would be many more millions. Time spent on the plan is also mind boggling as is the collective qualifications and experience of all those involved.

Ask any planner that works with the Unitary Plan and the good ones will tell you improvements that could be made. That is the nature of planning. You monitor the results of the rules and make changes to address unforeseen (or unintended issues). Whilst there are improvements that could be made, on the whole the Unitary Plan isn’t to blame for Auckland’s housing problems or what many people see as planning failures. For that matter, neither are planners but that’s another topic.

The Government’s recently announced direction to ‘override’ the Unitary Plan for specified development areas is no doubt a step forward for Kiwi Build. However, it’s a potential step back for planning in Auckland. It undermines the Unitary Plan and the millions of dollars and hours spent to develop it. In some ways it signals distrust in the combined expertise of those who wrote it. If the Government believes there are faults in the Unitary Plan why not get all the planners that apply for and process consents in Auckland together to fix them. That way, all developers and the future of Auckland would benefit.

The second part of the Governments announcement is to create an urban development authority, that will it seems to both plan and consent developments in specified areas. This seems to be to get around inefficient Council and development processes. There are three main reasons for these inefficiencies. These are the way Council operates, the costs of construction and development and finance. Creating an urban development authority addresses the first issue but only for parts of Auckland in the specified areas.

The main issue with resource consent processes, is the way that Council processes consents. Yes, the process was streamlined and simplified but that doesn’t mean that the attitudes and actions of Council teams magically become more efficient. At the end of the day they are understaffed and under appreciated. Most Council planners want good development. They have good intentions and they are good at their job. However, they work in a system that puts them under constant pressure. With too much work and not enough planners the only option is to ask applicants to agree to longer processing times.

Coupled with this, the Unitary Plan is relatively new. The recent example of application of rules in the underlying zone and in the special character areas is a good example of how the application of some rules is still being ironed out. Whilst we go through the ironing out phase there are issues with consistency. Different planners have different opinions on how rules should be interpreted.

Finance and construction costs are issues that are largely outside the ability of Council and planners to solve. But together there is no reason why we couldn’t make the process more consistent. There is no reason why the money that will be spent creating an urban development authority couldn’t be spent to make Council processes more efficient and to employ more staff and give them the training they need.

If handing development over to another authority is necessary, surely Housing NZ would be the obvious choice. Housing NZ are the experts in development. They are already able to achieve economies of scale and have very good design guides as well as a tested model of development. Why not use these strengths instead of creating a whole new agency? An agency that will benefit some, potentially at the cost of the rest.

The proposal to create an urban development authority does nothing to address the battles and frustrations faced by thousands of private developers. In the short term, it gets more houses built. They will be well planned and no doubt create pleasant communities. But at what long term cost? If the Government really wants to encourage more housing and more efficient processing of consents why not improve what we already have, rather than simply side stepping it to meet a political promise and leaving the rest of development in Auckland behind?