The reserve at Northcote during the January floods. Photo / supplied
THREE KEY FEATURES
Another autumn, more raging storms.
Aucklanders lost power in their thousands over the long Easter weekend, and some were flooded from their homes. But for the city as a whole, it wasn’t a disaster.
Not like 2023, when the late summer storms caused so much death and devastation. The cleanup from that time still isn’t over, let alone the restitution and the rebuild. Auckland Council and the Government both fret, with very good reason, about how they will be able to pay when the next big one strikes, and ratepayers and taxpayers fret with them.
The council and various Government agencies also fret about how to build and modify the city so it can withstand big storms.
Last week, I wrote about the Government’s plans for social housing construction, which involve welcome support for the community housing sector but a worrying lack of commitment to Government construction. The Easter storms provide important context for those plans.
It’s not that the council doesn’t know what to do about storms. It actually does. The Making Space for Water programme is a proven, global best-practice approach that, over time, will vastly improve Auckland’s resilience.
We saw that in 2023, in those parts of the city where the thinking had already been applied. One excellent example: Northcote.
With a fast-growing population, declining infrastructure and pressure on everything, Northcote has had some serious attention in recent years. New midrise compact housing projects, some of them award-winning, with a mix of market, affordable and social housing. A rejuvenated, walkable and human-scale town centre on the way, along with improved bus services, safer streets, new cycleways, more parks and recreational areas.
And both underground and above ground, they’ve retrofitted the suburb for climate resilience with rebuilt waterways.
In Northcote, they dug up the Awataha Stream, which had been piped underground since the 1950s, and restored it as a long, ribboned wetland area, a new home for birds and aquatic life. It’s called “daylighting the stream”.
And Greenslade Reserve, over the road from the town centre, with the stream running round it, was lowered by a metre to create a “water detention sink”. The rugby league pitches were then restored.
The 2023 Anniversary Weekend storm came just weeks after this work was finished. The stream has terraced banks, which channelled far more rain than could have fitted into a pipe. And the park turned into a reservoir, full to the brim.
There was still a little flooding, but the town centre and surrounding homes survived, as 12 million litres of water was contained and managed until it simply soaked away. The park and stream went back to being much-valued community assets.
There will be more storms such as those of 2023. In Auckland, Niwa expects that for every degree of global warming, storms will increase in intensity by 14%. But as much as is reasonably possible, central Northcote should be ready.
Close by, as it happens, plans for the Wairau Valley and Milford, both devastated in 2023, are caught up in a dispute about how to use the Takapuna Golf Course as a larger version of the Greenslade Reserve.
The makeover of Northcote has seen heavy private-sector involvement, including landscape architects at a local company called Isthmus, engineers from the global company WSP, mana whenua and some committed property developers.
On the public side, the Kaipātiki Local Board has been closely involved, and the flood control work was in the hands of a highly skilled bunch of engineers and planners in the Healthy Waters division of Auckland Council.
And, critically, the whole community-building endeavour has been led by two other public bodies: the council’s “placemaking” agency Eke Panuku, and the Crown housing agency Kāinga Ora. Under their joint leadership, Northcote is becoming a model suburb.
But what about the rest of us? Such developments are happening and are proposed for many other parts of the city, but there’s a problem.
The council has abolished Eke Panuku: by June 30, its work will be folded into the central council operations. And the Government has put most of Kāinga Ora’s construction projects on hold or abandoned them altogether.
KO’s full name is Kāinga Ora — Homes and Communities. But its “core purpose”, we are repeatedly told, is to be a landlord. Project development barely comes into it.
In my view, what’s happened in Northcote should happen all over Auckland. Denser, mixed housing, which provides a critical mass to support better services (especially in transport, recreation and retail), with climate-resilient infrastructure. It’s what we pay rates and taxes for.
Why? Daniel Henderson of the Tāmaki Regeneration Company (TRC) gave one answer when he spoke to a Property Council conference in March. The TRC is jointly owned by the Government and the council and is a major developer in Glen Innes, Panmure and Point England.
“The market will not build an affordable three-, four- or five-bedroom home in Tāmaki right now,” Henderson said bluntly. The public sector has to lead, or it won’t get done.
And there’s another reason. As Northcote shows, housing is not just about dwellings and what they cost to build. Good housing is the foundation for better health, education, employment and social cohesion. What Eke Panuku and Kāinga Ora have been committed to is building communities fit for purpose in the middle of this century and beyond.
And don’t we need it.
Does the council, about to swallow Eke Panuku, understand this? We don’t know yet. Surprisingly, for such an enormous change, they simply haven’t said anything about it.
As for the Government, the signals are mixed. On the one hand, just be a landlord. On the other, Housing, Infrastructure and RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop has gone out of his way in speeches this year to commend the work done by Phil Twyford, Minister for Housing and Urban Development in Jacinda Ardern’s coalition Government, 2017-2020.
Twyford has been frequently ridiculed, largely for committing the cardinal sin of over-promising and under-delivering. His goal of 1000 KiwiBuild homes in 2019 collapsed when the real figure of 300 emerged, and with that his dream of 100,000 new KiwiBuild homes in a decade died too.
But, Bishop told a Property Council conference in March, Twyford produced a National Policy Statement (NPS) on Urban Development that established the framework for land use, housing and community building in use today.
He commended the NPS and said he would be building on it, not undermining it. “There’s been 10 years of work in that whole area,” he said. “By both parties.”
He didn’t mention it, but that 10 years includes the formation of Kāinga Ora in 2019, which was done by combining Housing New Zealand, KiwiBuild and HLC, a public body that began life as the Hobsonville Land Company before being given a wider brief and the new name of Homes, Land and Communities. Twyford’s NPS grew out of these reforms.
In fact, in broad terms, the current approach to building public housing, affordable homes and communities goes back longer than 10 years. The TRC was formed in 2012, HLC in 2006 (Hobsonville Point was originally planned as a fully mixed community until Sir John Key removed social housing from the plans).
And in 2017, under Prime Minister Sir Bill English and Housing Minister Amy Adams, National had its own ambitious plans.
As a Treasury paper from that year explained, the Crown Building Project was a 10-year plan to build 13,500 new “social houses for vulnerable families” and 20,600 new “affordable and market homes for first-home buyers and the wider market”. Housing NZ was to build 24,000 of these homes in Auckland.
The plan was never tested because National lost the 2017 election. Nor were its goals as high as Labour’s achievement in the following six years: 12,000 more social housing units, 10,000 of them new-builds, and a boom in market homes, too. But still, it’s a little-remembered fact that National said it would build a lot of low-cost new homes.
Now, as I revealed last week, the same Bill English argues the Crown should withdraw completely from housing construction. The Government seems to be at least partly convinced.
At that Property Council conference, new KO chief executive Matt Crockett reinforced the new message. “We’re shifting our focus from building to the existing stock,” he said.
Oh, and they’re also cutting $200 million from their maintenance budget.
Building communities fit for purpose in the 21st century? They hardly talk about it.
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