KEY POINTS:
High land costs and crippling delays caused by councils not processing building consents fast enough have been blamed for strangling Auckland's housing supply.
Motu's report on the city's housing supply, released today by the Centre for Housing Research, pinpointed these two issues as the main factors causing the housing crisis and recommended punitive steps to resolve the situation.
The report is the second to be issued on the city's accommodation crisis. The rental sector is predicted to boom, as home ownership is denied to just under half the city's population by 2016.
The Motu report called for district plans to be simplified and for councils to be actively punished, forced to pay half the funding costs for developments which were not processed in the regulatory timeframe.
"This would provide balanced incentives for the council and for the developer to hasten the consent processing period," the report said.
The report also examined the effects of abolishing Auckland's ringfence, or metropolitan urban limit and for more land to be freed up for development.
"An alternative to extending the limit is to completely overhaul zoning and other regulatory processes to enable intensification within built-up areas," it said.
"District plans would have to focus on effects rather than on specific criteria. The Resource Management Act process needs a revamp to reduce delays associated with objections.
"One possibility is to allow expert panels to preside over consent decisions in cases where a development proposal falls outside the existing District Plan."
It promoted the idea of a compulsory acquisition process that would enable councils to purchase properties once a sufficient proportion of residents had agreed to sell to allow larger scale medium and high density housing.
Given the scale of Auckland's housing issues, it was likely that "both expansion and intensification will be required".
