Environmental irony seen as developers' dreams founder

Nigel McKenna at Flat Bush which he helped to develop back in 2007. Photo / NZ Herald

The financial failure of five big Auckland fringe property projects has been blamed on over-ambitious plans outside city limits.

Phil McDermott, a consultant in urban, economic and community development, land use and transport, said developers' dreams were too great to succeed.

He was responding to a Weekend Herald feature about the ditching or reduction of projects stretching from Clevedon to Orewa where entire new communities were planned.

Kensington Park is the only plan being built, sold to John Sax, while the other schemes are either rejected by courts or councils or ditched.

McDermott said these new communities were largely outside Auckland's boundaries and that was a major reason for the failures.

"Perhaps most obviously, some of the projects cited were overturned because they contravened the Auckland regional policy statement's commitment to largely containing growth within Auckland's existing boundaries. In other cases, protracted planning requirements simply delayed getting projects to the market, precipitating or compounding any problems of financial over-leveraging.

"The irony is that a number of these projects were responding to the strictures of smart growth, reducing vehicle dependence, increasing housing densities, promoting pedestrianisation and public transit, and integrating local commercial and residential activity.

"Some were potentially exemplars of the sustainability principles behind the regional policy statement. Unfortunately, these principles were buried by the practice of defending the Metropolitan Urban Limit at all costs and regardless of consequences," McDermott said.

Banks might think twice about funding such grand plans. "They compound the nervousness of financiers for large developments," he said.

Cornerstone Group's Rick Martin, who sold a leasehold interest in land for the now-ditched Albany City Property Investments' scheme and sold the 464ha Waimauku block where he planned housing, cried out about being included in the list of five.

"I don't think I should be amongst that list. I'm still in business."

BIG FIVE

Fringe-city schemes which have been axed, scaled back or sold:

*Albany City Property Investments
*Clevedon Canal Scheme
*Kensington Park, Orewa
*Flat Bush, Manukau
*Waimauku Estate Village