95bFM Concerns National's housing plans could be inequitable
9 June, 2023
Interview by Spike Keith, adapted by Mahdhi Osman-Penrice
In 2021 Labour and National worked together on a plan to address Aotearoa's housing crisis. But after push-back from their voter base, National is saying they made a mistake. Illustration: Bailey Fleming.
The National Party has recently announced it will walk back its commitment to the bipartisan Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS) if elected in October. MDRS allow developers to build three units up to three stories tall in cities across Aotearoa.
National worked with the government to develop the standards in 2021 as a means of soothing New Zealand’s rampant housing crisis.
But they have now ditched the policy to let councils choose their own approach — increase housing density in urban areas or develop unused farmland to meet the demand for housing over the next 30 years.
Senior Lecturer of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland, Tim Welch told 95bFM’s The Wire that he is wary of greenfield development which he describes as “low-density urban sprawl in areas such as agricultural land, wetlands, and even flood plains."
Welch said greenfield development requires a lot of new infrastructure.
"New roads, pipes, sewers, broadband, and power connections, all that infrastructure services much fewer people than they do in an urban place”.
He argued that the cost of building new infrastructure in undeveloped areas would put an unequal strain on ratepayers in urban areas.
National has promised to have developers foot the bill for infrastructure, by reforming the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Act (IFF) to make the process of funding infrastructure easier and charging high up-front costs to developers.
But Welch is concerned about the ongoing cost of infrastructure upkeep after it is built.
“We are saddling ourselves with decades of infrastructure that will need to be kept up, maintained, and serviced, and as a result, those costs go back to people that live everywhere across the city, not just developers and those living in the suburbs”.
Welch said uncertainty around MDRS may lead developers to “wait and see”, due to the high expense of tearing down a building on an existing section to build additional units.
“When a developer is looking at the economics and they have the opportunity to build out into greenfields, they are more likely to jump at that opportunity where there are much higher profit margins.”
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