Auckland's growing pains

By ANNE GIBSON

Steven Ames would prefer not to discuss Beaverton Creek, or Beaverton Round for that matter. The planner from Portland, Oregon, thinks problems in this area on the outskirts of his city are no reason to doubt his wider vision.

Ames is a respected planner whose "smart growth" strategy in his home town has become a model around the world, including Auckland, whose planners refer to it as intensification or the Regional Growth Strategy.

This month, the Auckland Regional Council invited the mild-mannered Ames to speak to staff of the ARC, Auckland City Council, planners, academics, architects and students about what he calls "a strategic vision of long-term growth".

He said that the Auckland strategy was similar to Portland's.

Auckland Regional Council strategic analyst David Lindsey said Ames' visit was important. "We felt it would be a good opportunity to have a wider audience in Auckland to hear someone who is an expert in community visioning and smart growth and an opportunity to ask 'how is it going over there?'," Lindsey said.

But not everyone is impressed. Some regard Portland as one of the best-planned cities in the world, but critics point to problems as evidence that smart growth has failed - as exemplified in the Beaverton area.

US planner and smart growth opponent Randal O'Toole, director of the Thoreau Institute and the American Dream Coalition, this year staged a conference which toured Beaverton to look at what could go wrong with the smart growth policy.

O'Toole's two organisations are environmental groups which favour market solutions to growth, advocating letting people live where they want to, with neighbourhood associations writing their own planning rules.

O'Toole reckoned planners should see Portland as a failure of Ames' planned, managed growth approach. Portland is famous for its urban-growth boundaries, rail transit and transit-oriented developments, but O'Toole asked if these really added to quality of life or just cost more than they were worth?

He cited Beaverton Round, a project which famously failed and was left half-finished for more than two years because the developer could not find financiers willing to put up money for a development with inadequate parking. Another developer finished it only after getting assurance that he could provide plenty of parking, O'Toole said.

Another development, Beaverton Creek, was supposed to be mixed-use. Though it has room for at least a dozen shops, only one is occupied because there is not enough parking to support the others.

"While urban mayors 'ooh' and 'ah' over Portland's light rail, and planners thrill to the region's urban-growth boundaries and transit-oriented development, residents see the dark side to smart growth - rapidly increasing congestion, higher housing prices and more development of urban open spaces. Portland proves that smart growth does not work," O'Toole wrote after the conference.

Not surprisingly, Ames rejected the criticism. He said Beaverton was being revived by a new developer. "It's just anecdotal - anyone can find examples of things that don't work." He admitted: "If you don't agree with the Portland system and you wanted to find bad examples of it, you would look at Beaverton."

He pointed to the success of Portland's environmentally friendly building, with features such as roof-top "rain gardens" to reduce stormwater overflows.

New Zealander Owen McShane, director of the Centre for Resource Management Studies, who is also an opponent of the ARC's growth strategy and who went to O'Toole's conference, toured Beaverton and said Portland gave him the urban creeps.

McShane, who lives at Kaiwaka in Northland, saw empty light-rail carriages which had windows blacked out to disguise their deficiencies, embarrassingly vacant shops where artists had been employed to paint windows to show people within, and suburbs which had banned "big box" stores like the Warehouse.

After the trip, McShane asked what the US had to fear from urban sprawl when only 6 per cent of its land mass was urbanised. He queried

why regional councils in Auckland and Canterbury would want to follow the smart growth model advocated by Ames and others who favour Portland, a city which he said has led the US in the loss of housing affordability in the past decade.

Smart growth's biggest threat to the New Zealand economy is the idea that the countryside is an extension of the conservation estate and must be frozen to protect its natural state, McShane said.

But Lindsey of the ARC defends Ames and the Portland approach and believes the Regional Growth Strategy has to be given time to succeed in Auckland.

"The growth strategy has only been out for five years and you can't turn a city around in that time," he said. When Auckland is 30 years down the track, we might be on the way towards the region we want to become, he suggested

Any failures were the result of various councils in Auckland failing to incorporate the strategy into their plans to ensure it worked, he said.

Ames agreed some Portland authorities were stopping retailers developing large-format stores, preferring a more intimate retail environment.

"Some jurisdictions in the [suburban] areas have rejected applications for big-box retail stores moving in," Ames said, citing Hillsboro authorities in Portland, who turned down plans for a giant Walmart in favour of smaller-scale retail projects without acres of carparking. "Big-box retail stores put people out of work and destroy downtown areas," Ames said.

He used aerial maps to compare Portland and Seattle to show the difference between urban sprawl in the cities, and spurned the Washington State city for "uncontrolled and not compact" sprawl which has spread across Puget Sound and into the Cascade Mountains.

"In the last quarter of the 20th century, Portland literally transformed itself from a city with a dying urban core into a model of urban redevelopment, garnering an international reputation as a leader in mass transit, smart growth and urban liveability," Ames said.

It remains to be seen if Auckland can do the same.On the web

Planning so far

Auckland planners have a vision for the future of the city and the blueprint is the Auckland Regional Growth Strategy. But its first five years are not a record of unblemished success. Auckland Regional Council director of strategic policy Craig Shearer gave an update to the Property Council this month where he revealed that not all had gone well with the plan.

* Development of rapid transit corridors - a central part of the plan to intensify areas - was not happening fast enough.

* Large blocks of land had not been amalgamated as envisaged.

* Rampant immigration and population growth had far outstripped projections, putting more pressure on Auckland, which was now running out of land.

* Development has occurred on the fringes of the city, where land was cheaper, and not enough in the more central areas earmarked for intensification.

* Infill housing - squeezing a house on the back section of another house - has put pressure on infrastructure such as roads, stormwater and water networks throughout the metropolitan area. The pressure from this trend is difficult to manage.

* Added to these problems is a public wary of intensification of housing and growth within the city limits. But Shearer cited the council's surveys which indicated people living in high-density complexes were no more or less satisfied than those in more traditional types of housing.

www.americandreamcoalition.org

www.ti.org

www.growthforum.govt.nz