NZ Herald editorial: Affordable houses will need to be well designed

Housing Minister Phil Twyford has a great deal riding on his plan to produce "affordable" housing on land to be relinquished by the tertiary education institute Unitec, but a great deal has to happen between making a plan and building a house. Nobody has used the word "crisis" for housing more often than Twyford, Labour's spokesman on the subject ever since there really was a crisis of rocketing house prices in Auckland. Now, with prices stable and the minister six months in office, he needs to show some progress.

The Unitec development looks ideal as a prototype for the "Kiwibuld" state housing programme that has been the centrepiece of Labour's answer to housing affordability. There is plenty of surplus land on the site occupied for many years by Oakley Hospital. Twyford has not revealed the price he is paying Unitec for it but it is unlikely to be the value the land could command on the open market.

It is close to the new Waterview motorway interchange, giving the future residents easy access to jobs in West and South Auckland as well as the inner city. It lies between the established suburbs of Mt Albert and Waterview and the former hospital grounds provide a green and leafy environment for the blocks of low-cost, high density housing on the plan.

It is to be a mix of affordable (up to $600,000) and open-market houses as well as some state housing, Twyford said. But if it is going to be the model for state housing under this Labour Government it will need to avoid the mistakes of previous ones. The houses and blocks of housing must not have a uniform design. They will need to be sprinkled among those that are owner-occupied and indistinguishable as state tenancies.

Most important, the development will need to provide more than houses. Speaking at the launch of the plan on the site on Sunday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the scheme included new shops, parks and possibly a school. It will need all those and more to become a successful community.

Twyford is talking of 3000 to 4000 new homes on the 29ha he is acquiring from Unitec. Auckland has been building about 7000 new houses a year and it needs to build twice that number every year to keep pace with projected demand. All going to plan, construction will start on the Kiwibuild project next year. By then he will need to have many such projects on the drawing board if he is to be produce Labour's promises of 100,000 houses within 10 years.

That will require 3000 to 4000 additional completed houses every year on top of the 7000 the private sector is producing. The risk is that the Government's programme will displace private-sector house building rather than add to it, by attracting builders and other resources in short supply. To avoid that risk, the Government needs to ensure it is training or importing its own skilled builders and tradespeople. It has at least made an exception for Kiwibuild's requirements in its cuts to skilled immigration.

All going well, it should be a good use of a large, underused area of the city that has been ripe for a plan such as this.