Brian Rudman: So show us some decent high-density housing

Talk about bad timing. In the midst of the leaky building crisis, up pop politicians such as Auckland Deputy Mayor Bruce Hucker and regional council chairman Mike Lee trying to soften us up for high-density housing.

Well sure, Bruce, after you. As for me, I think I'll stay put for now.

With every other newish house seemingly stricken with rotting balconies and awash with killer fungi, my gut instinct is better the damp and windy old villa or the fibro-boarded state house you know than any suspect Noddy house with plastic walls and metal windows.

At a protest meeting on Tuesday night, Dr Hucker and his bureaucratic entourage tried to persuade the doubters that intensification would make what he called the "liveable" - a council buzz word - community of Glen Innes even "more liveable".

I'm not surprised the audience remained unbelievers. I'm sure if we went through the council's propaganda files we'd find the same sort of soft-soap employed in the recent past to justify the building practices that led to leaky homes and to sell the high-rise chicken coop apartment blocks that now blot inner-city ridges.

Which is by way of saying the advocates of intensification have some catching up to do as far as credibility is involved.

That said, I hope they don't chicken out following this week's opposition.

Common sense tells us that Auckland can't continue oozing out through prosperous farmland and valuable open space until it hits Whangarei in one direction and Hamilton in the other.

Well of course it can, if we continue to stand aside and let it happen. But would future generations thank us for the ugly sprawling megalopolis we left behind?

It's a pity that an educated man like Tamaki College principal David Hodge has chosen to play the Jeremiah, darkly warning that intensification could lead to Glen Innes becoming the "worst urban slum in New Zealand".

If everything was to go awfully wrong, he might be right. But equally possible is a repeat of the trail-blazing successful experiment in intensification, the post-war slum clearances in Freemans Bay.

The apartments and town houses built in the 1950s and 1960s in that Auckland City council-led redevelopment are now much sought-after privately owned inner- city dwellings.

A highlight of that redevelopment was Sheridan Square, which the Herald, in an opening day supplement in February 1970, called "the prototype of what may well become a common feature of Auckland life". The homes in the square, said the report, are officially known as "town houses".

The 17 two- and three-bedroom town houses were an answer to urban sprawl, and were designed - by city council architects - with an emphasis on privacy, with protected front and back courtyards, and landscaped open space for the exclusive use of residents.

The density of these town houses is around 32 to the hectare, which is lower than the Auckland Regional Council's aim of around 50 but much better than the 10 dwellings per hectare of much of Auckland.

Institute of Architects urban issues spokesman Graeme Scott supports intensification but says it's up to councils to prove they can be great places to live. He suggests they build a quality showcase development for poorer areas to prove their point. He could also have referred them back to the Freemans Bay experiment because that's what happened there thanks to a collaboration between local government initiative and design skills, central government funding and private builders' expertise.

Now, nearly 40 years on, we need a repeat performance in Glen Innes. Instead of rezoning suburbs and standing back and waiting for the freemarket cowboys to do their worst, it's up to public agencies to take the lead - as central Government did in a big way from the 1930s with state housing and Auckland City did in Freemans Bay.

The right-wing John Banks-led Auckland City Council was gearing up to invest millions of dollars in buying up port company land, redeveloping it and selling it on. The underlying reason was to ensure quality development. Why not the same activist role in the field of housing intensification?

Let the city join Housing New Zealand and come up with model intensive housing of a quality, an affordability and design that confounds critics like Headmaster Hodge and has them queuing to buy when the first units go on the market.