Samantha Motion: My fridge is full of unneeded jelly and I blame population growth

What your fridge looks like when you're preparing for dental surgery. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

My fridge is full of jelly I don't need.

Pottles and moulds of it. And pumpkin soup my mum made. And stewed apples.

I don't normally subsist on a diet of only soft foods but I prepared to do so this week because I was supposed to have oral surgery.

Minutes before I was meant to be put under, however, the operation was canned - apparently, there wasn't a spare bed in the hospital for me if they wanted to keep an eye on me overnight.

I felt bad for all the medical staff involved, it was rough news to deliver to an already very nervous person in a hospital gown toting, as instructed, an overnight bag.

One of the reasons I was given for the bed issue boiled down to growth.

Tauranga had grown faster than expected when the hospital was planned and capacity was sometimes an issue, they said.

I'm not trying to have a whinge, here. These things happen, I'm not in pain and my husband is thrilled to have an unassailable reason to eat a lot of jelly as a grown adult.

Pumpkin soup and stewed apples will freeze for when a new date to go under the dreaded drill rolls around.

But that strange day got me thinking about the individual impact of this city's struggle with rapid growth, and how we can see it spreading to other neighbouring districts such as Rotorua and Whakatāne.

Tauranga, the biggest city in the Bay of Plenty, is growing at a rate significantly greater than what was expected - in fact, the whole region is.

Research in 2002 estimated the city would have a population of 135,800 by 2021.

Add on the neighbouring Western Bay and the total would be 188,800.

Well, we haven't made it to 2021 but those estimates have long been left in the dust.

Statistics New Zealand population estimates released last week pegged the population of the two districts at a combined 207,900 - 151,300 in Tauranga and 56,600 in the Western Bay.

That's just over 19,000 more people in total than were being planned for in the sub-region.

Rotorua too - once a city heading for stagnant population growth - has defied expectations.

It has eclipsed the 72,300 population expected for 2021 to hit 77,300 in the most recent projection.

Whakatāne was expected to hit 33,500 next year, instead, it's at 38,200. Kawerau is up too.

The only district in the region tracking anywhere close to those 2002 projections is Opotiki, which is slightly under.

Long story short, a region that was planning, at one point, to accommodate 311,100 residents by next year is instead trying to manage 337,300 - and the tap is still running.

Source: Environment Bay of Plenty Demographic Forecast 2051.

The headline of last week's Stats NZ release said: "Plenty of people moving to the Bay."

The region's population grew 2.8 per cent in the year ended June - a bigger increase than any other region in New Zealand - and, as has been the trend, most of those 9100 people went into Tauranga and the Western Bay.

So it's no wonder we're still struggling to catch up.

While there are lots of conversations about the major, costly impacts of this rampant growth on our cities and districts as a whole, the day-to-day, personal stuff gets a bit glossed over.

One person's delayed surgery is a drop in the bucket as an issue compared to the eye-wateringly complex challenge of figuring out how to pay for billions of dollars worth of vital infrastructure - roads, pipes, parks - in the next few decades and bring down the price of housing (or lift earnings?) without gutting a generation's retirement savings.

But when you add up those little things, they can take a significant toll, especially in the parts of the community that don't have the resources the top end of town enjoys.

People feel the pressure in a personal way when the minutes slowly add on to their commutes. It's worse if your job involves being on the road a lot, and let's not forget the urgent minutes added to the journeys of emergency services.

And you need to be realistic about what anyone can do about this - the situation is going to get worse before it gets better and, for the most part, we're just going to have to live with it.

People feel that growth pressure as rat-runners take over their once-quiet residential streets.

It grates as they fruitlessly apply for a limited pool of rental properties - for which prices continue to climb - or stretch their finances to the limit to get into a first home. In this housing area, especially, Rotorua and Whakatāne are also feeling the pain.

Public spaces are getting busier so tensions seem to flare up more often between people doing different things - often things they've been doing forever with little issue.

Think about beaches - you've got parents trying to stop their little kids from shovelling sand into their mouths or dashing into the ocean, while also protecting them from unleashed dogs, the owners of which - Millennials who only bought a house to get a dog - are just trying to get some exercise in.

Schools are squeezed and, on our sports fields, teams aren't just competing against other teams - the codes themselves are in a battle against each other for space to train.

Every now and again there's a day when the negative impacts of this rapid growth seem to pervade every part of life and it just feels a bit exhausting.

On those days, I sometimes fantasise about working remotely from some tiny seaside community where all the sections are 800sq m, everything is in walking distance and I never have to see any Facebook posts complaining about parking.

But then I remember some upsides to all this growth.

Economies of scale open the door to a lot of services that take the edge off modern city life - click-and-collect groceries, home-delivered almost anything and an array of entertainment options - markets, restaurants, shows - that is getting better and more varied every day.

And, there are jobs here.

So we stay, and we grizzle a bit, and we hope that the people with the purse strings and the mandate to prepare us for the next few decades understand the problems they are grappling with are not just faceless city-scale challenges, but also personal pains.