Strategy ‘impedes growth’

By Laura Kvigstad, Auckland Council reporter. Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.

Auckland Councillors have supported a draft Future Development Strategy for consultation despite concerns that it will impede the development of growth in rural areas.

Council estimates that by 2053, Auckland’s population will grow to more than 2.2 million, requiring an additional 200,000 dwellings and 282,600 jobs.

The strategy will guide this growth over the next 30 years and it also addresses protecting and restoring the natural environment, building resilience to natural hazards and climate change, and how to make the best use of limited funding for infrastructure.

Growth and spatial strategy principal advisor Claire Gray told a Planning, Environment and Parks committee on May 4 that the strategy takes a quality, compact approach.

“Thinking about employment closer to homes, reducing the need to travel and creating really strong centres in those subregions,” Gray said.

It recommends that most growth occurs in existing urban areas and proposes delaying or stopping development in specific greenfield areas (undeveloped land) that have previously been identified for future urban development, due to natural hazard risk, impacts on our ability to halve emissions and the high infrastructure costs associated with this development.

Cr Andy Baker said the strategy “slams the door” on development for rural settlements, preventing them from being able to become sustainable.

“Previous planning decisions have created these remote urban settlements, which contribute intensely [to emissions] because people have to travel,” Baker said. He asked how rural settlements, which were becoming more urban, had been factored into the strategy.

Auckland Plan strategy and research general manager Jacques Victor said the strategic direction was to not have development in “far flung” areas because of emissions.

“The approach is that we should not continue to expand small rural settlements with further development, which then requires additional infrastructure,” Victor said.

“To make them sustainable means you will have to add significant urban expansion, which has to be funded.”

Baker said he would not support the strategy for consultation while it failed to allow existing rural settlements to grow.

“The only way we can mitigate those issues – the climate, the environment –is by actually allowing growth to create scale,” Baker said. “We shouldn’t deny those settlements the ability to create employment and become sustainable.”

He said Beachlands had doubled in size and without further growth, the area would not be allowed a secondary school by the Ministry of Education.

“Every day, 12 buses line up to take secondary school age children to schools in Howick and in Pakuranga and elsewhere in Auckland because there is no secondary school.”

Baker said while he did not want to see rural areas growing houses rather than food, where appropriate, development needed to be enabled.

Consultation for the draft strategy was passed with 10 councillors voting against, including Greg Sayers, Wayne Walker and John Watson.

The draft strategy is expected to be released for public comment early next month.

It will then go to the Governing Body for adoption later in the year, replacing the 2018 Development Strategy and the 2017 Future Urban Land Supply Strategy.