Rudman's city: Bolting the stable door after the horse moves in

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Aucklanders have never been that good at planning. You only have to wonder what happened to Surveyor-General Felton Mathew's grand 1840 symmetrical street plan of the proposed city to realise that our shortcomings in this department have a long pedigree.

It should come as no surprise, then, to see local politicians and bureaucrats scurrying around now advocating new rules and regulations for medium and high-density housing. This some years after regional and city councils began encouraging such new patterns of living.

There are worries about cladding systems, for instance, and about interapartment noise leakage. Both issues, you might have thought, would have been addressed before the developers were welcomed in.

Then there are the more subjective matters of quality standards. Auckland City's city development committee chairwoman, Juliet Yates, is seeking changes to the 1991 Building Act to prevent "building of interior slums" in the city. Her worries revolve around low-cost student accommodation and boarding houses.

"I am personally dismayed when I see plans for high-rise student accommodation which have a large number of rooms per floor and very few bathrooms and toilets. Our students deserve better than that. Limited facilities may have been acceptable in Victorian days, but they are not acceptable now."

As a true-blue conservative, Mrs Yates is still a worshipper at the altar of "minimum regulation". But she warns her faith is wearing thin. She says she's off to tell developers "that either they stop building these slums voluntarily or the council will make them stop".

I find her faith in the ability to appeal to an Auckland property developer's better nature rather touching, if a tad optimistic.

Why would they put in more toilets than they can get away with in their development, particularly if they are competing with a rival development just down the road? Instead of threatening to tighten the rules, I can't help feeling Mrs Yates should just get on with it and produce some rules and regulations that ensure 21st-century quality development, rather than 19th-century, is the only quality allowed.

This worry about quality is also the theme of regional council chairman Phil Warren's submissions to a Government review of the Building Act. He writes as chairman of the Auckland Regional Growth Forum, the body responsible for the emphasis on medium and high-density housing.

Concluding that high-density, multi-unit housing is an important component of the regional growth strategy and "an option of choice for many people", he says that "the quality of these developments needs to be increased so that they do not become the slums of the future".

I find it rather alarming to read that the law, regulations and codes were all developed "before there was a significant market in multi-unit residential development and conversions to residential uses. It is unclear whether building materials and techniques have been tested for suitability for multi-unit residential developments in New Zealand".

He highlights the durability of building materials - in particular, expanded polystyrene - and sound insulations as two major issues.

As a layman, it seems odd that such issues were not addressed before the green light was switched on for cheek-by-jowl living. Already 12 per cent of us are living in "multi-unit housing forms". By 2050, Mr Warren says 30 per cent of us will be.

When along that rising line were the experts planning to start checking the suitability of cladding and noise-insulation materials?

Other problems relating to high-density housing have come to the fore as well. The fiasco in inner-city Mount St, for example. That's where Mrs Yates was forced, because of the planning rules, to approve a new 13-storey residential tower only 1.5m away from the balconies of a similarly high building, blocking its light and views.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of higher-density living. Not that you'd get me into a high-rise. Well, not yet anyway. I still need a bit of earth around me to grow the odd lettuce and chilli plant. But higher-density living brings a sense of community back into the central city and the suburban townships further out.

Also, lots of people enjoy the lifestyle. An ARC survey in August last year showed that 40 per cent of residents living in medium to higher-density housing were committed to this type of living and were not aspiring to live in a standalone house on its own section.

Also, overall satisfaction rates were more than 80 per cent for things such as security, sunlight, affordability, closeness to shops and public transport. Even with noise, 79 per cent were satisfied - presumably with the lack of it.

I guess with these levels of satisfaction you could argue that the status quo is working well and there's no need for further regulations. But I don't think the owners of the Mount St apartments would agree.

And as for quality standards, we all know that even the cheap and nasty doesn't look so bad when new.