The villas of Devonport, which are not at risk from the council's new plans. Photo / Michael Craig
There's a house in Mt Roskill, an old and entirely unremarkable box of a place, sitting on a large section on a busy bus route, just a few minutes' walk from the shops. One day, there'll be a light rail station nearby as well.
Jon Turner of the Puketāpapa Local Board, which covers Mt Roskill, showed a photo of this house to Auckland Council on Thursday when they were debating their density plans for the city.
Probably everyone would agree, said Turner, that it's the very definition of a property ripe for development.
Everyone except council, that is. That night, after an 11-hour meeting, they decided the house should remain part of a "special character area" (SCA). Protected from development. Excluded from the density proposals that Parliament – that's Labour, National, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori – has agreed must apply right across Auckland, and in our other fast-growing major cities.
Meanwhile, there are villas in Birkenhead that will no longer enjoy special character protection. What's going on?
Council's SCAs predate the new law. They were established in 2016 when the Auckland Unitary Plan (AUP), the blueprint for what can be built where, came into effect. What council has now done is review the SCAs to decide which parts it thinks should remain and which should go.
Nothing is set in stone, yet. The council will confirm its proposed revisions to the AUP in August. They will then go to an Independent Hearings Panel (IHP) which will call for public submissions and consider how well the plan meets the requirements of the new law. Its recommendations will then go back to council. If they're accepted, they'll become law. If they're not, the Minister for the Environment has the power to step in. This will all take about a year.
In its defence, the council's new proposals were not decided house by house. Its officers surveyed the streets, looking at each property against a set of six criteria that include scale, architectural style, the condition of the house and its relationship to other houses nearby.
If the officers decided 66 per cent of the properties in any given area met a quality standard for at least five of those criteria, the area was given an SCA designation. That run-down house in Mt Roskill is near a whole bunch of other houses the officers believe do meet the criteria. Much of Birkenhead and parts of Northcote Point are losing their SCA status because, despite the presence of many splendid old houses, they don't overall meet the criteria.
Council made its decisions on this at the end of the 11-hour meeting on Thursday. The councillors heard from the officers, and about half the local boards. They had already received thousands of written submissions and heard a great many in-person submissions.
They didn't review the detail of the SCAs or look at whether any individual properties should be included. They argued the larger principles: the importance of history and character in our suburbs, and the need for more housing and more affordable housing.
They also argued tactics. The new proposals reduce the total number of homes in SCAs by about 5000, or 25 per cent of the total. Would that be enough to satisfy the independent commissioners and the minister?
Mayor Phil Goff supports the overall thrust of the council's SCA plans, but he told the Herald there was "nothing special" about that Mt Roskill property, or its neighbours.
He seemed to imply they'll be making some changes before August. "That one's not tenable," he said.
Council did consider whether to lower the threshold for SCAs, keeping the 66 per cent requirement but including areas where the houses meet four or more of the criteria, instead of five or six. The vote on that was lost 11-10, with one abstention and one absence.
Council also discussed St Marys Bay, where some streets will lose their SCA designation, but there was no change to that proposal.
In the end, the vote for the new plan was put in the form of a motion with 22 clauses and 17 subclauses. It passed comfortably, with several councillors recording their opposition to specific clauses.
When it's all washed up, assuming no significant changes, Auckland's existing residential zones will disappear. It will be legal to build to three storeys, closer to boundaries than now, on all properties except those within an SCA, without a resource consent. You will still need a building consent, which sets the rules for construction quality.
The SCAs that remain cover only about 3 per cent of the city's housing, but are focused in a ring of suburbs around the city centre, including nearly all of Devonport, Ponsonby, Grey Lynn and Mt Eden and large parts of Kingsland, Sandringham, Epsom and Parnell. Leafy suburbs. Villa suburbs.
To be clear: these suburbs keep their density protection. Other leafy suburbs, like Birkenhead, Northcote Point, Mt Albert and Remuera, retain some of their SCA status but lose parts of it too.
THE PLAN TO intensify housing in Auckland has angered a lot of people. Roughly speaking, there are three camps. The first are heritage campaigners. In essence, they fear the loss of villas. The second are density campaigners. In essence, they say the heritage campaigners are holding on to their privilege at the expense of everyone else.
And the third camp comprises people who hope to find a middle way. This group includes many architects and planners, although there are architects and planners in both the other camps too. The third group also includes the council itself.
Heritage campaigners and the council both argue that density is occurring at pace in Auckland. Dwelling consents are at 20,000 a year, a record high, and two-thirds of that is because of a boom in apartment blocks. The construction industry is working at capacity. The AUP already allows for 900,000 new homes.
Why do we need more? As council planner John Duguid explained on Thursday, "Planning rules don't deliver houses, they enable houses." Because your street is zoned for more density, it doesn't follow it will happen.
The new rules make density easier to achieve, but they can't make it happen in any one place. That's why the capacity to grow has to be greater than the growth that will occur.
Density advocates say the argument we don't need to change the fringe suburbs is misleading. It helps, they say, to think of Auckland's housing development as a doughnut. The sticky American sort, with a hole in the middle.
It's a doughnut in reverse. Right in the middle, in the inner city, growth is booming. Further out it's also booming, in a wide ring from the Upper Harbour through Henderson, New Lynn, Mt Roskill, Onehunga, down to Manukau and Papakura, east to Flat Bush and up to Howick and Glen Innes.
But between those two zones lies the doughnut ring. As our "Dwelling consents" map shows, there has been very little residential development in the leafy suburbs of the city fringe.
They're the sweet spot – or the city's sickly junk food, depending on which camp you're in. They've seen some growth, especially near train stations, but those projects are exceptions.
The lack of development in the doughnut is not an accident and nor is it caused by high property values. It's the result of a decision by Auckland Council to keep things that way.
The council did this through the Auckland Unitary Plan, and not just with its special character areas. The AUP includes four residential zones. One of them is called THAB: terraced apartment and apartment buildings.
THAB allows for dwellings of between five and seven storeys and is the closest thing Auckland has to a density zone. In theory, the zone applies around metropolitan, town and local centres and near transit stations and major bus routes.
But although there are many such areas in the doughnut, there are almost no THAB zones.
Defenders of this set-up argue there's another way to look at this. While it's clearly to the benefit of villa owners in the doughnut not to have apartment blocks built next door, it's also to the benefit of the whole city.
We can all, they say, enjoy the lovely old homes in the leafy suburbs. They are part of our history: the heritage we owe to everyone, in the past, now, and in the future, to preserve.
But it's not just an aesthetic proposition. A study by the Infrastructure Commission, published in March this year, reported that house prices in Auckland would be as much as 69 per cent lower than they are now if councils in the 1970s and 1980s had not "down-zoned" close to city centres and in city fringe suburbs.
The commission also pointed out that underinvestment in public transport had helped cause the problem. With slower commuting speeds on the roads, demand for homes close to the city centre rose, even though the supply did not.
All of this means that poorer people were forced out of the protected fringe suburbs – most obviously in Freemans Bay, Ponsonby and Grey Lynn – to areas with lower-grade housing stock and the worst public transport. The villa suburbs are not a quirk of history or the natural order of things. They are colonial history, continuing to play out in real life today.
Councillor Angela Dalton from Manurewa-Papakura said on Thursday, "I support heritage, heritage is important, we're a young city and we don't have a lot. But I come from a ward that bears the brunt of intensification." The protections for some parts of the city were "not fair to the rest of the region", and while they had heard a lot from people in those parts, "I want to hear what all of Auckland says".
Councillor Linda Cooper, who represents the west, said, "The less development you get in areas closer to the centre, in the inner suburbs, in places near good transport … the intensification just comes out to the far-flung suburbs where there is no proper transport. That causes them more harm."
On the other hand, councillor Sharon Stewart of Howick said she remembered a former councillor saying "we need to build affordable housing near Glenbrook", which is in the countryside. "We should be building where the blue-collar want to work, if they want to work."
Of the local boards that reported to council on Thursday, most of those from the leafy suburbs opposed any reduction in the SCAs and wanted smaller walkable catchments too. All the boards from further out largely supported the council proposals.
"WHAT WE'RE GOING to do here," said Stewart, "is completely destroy our heritage."
But the debate about "character areas" is not a debate about "heritage". They're not the same thing. Heritage is recognised in law and buildings with heritage protections not threatened by the new law.
"A historic heritage place," says the council, "has a story about how it is associated with people and the past. They include a wide range of specific places (houses, roads, property), archaeological sites, natural features, and sites of significance to Māori. The Resource Management Act recognises heritage as a matter of national importance to be protected from inappropriate subdivision, use, and development."
"Character" is a different concept. It's an invention of councils keen to describe areas of older housing that "maintain a sense of history" but are not at the standard required for heritage protection.
The distinction is important, but on Thursday several councillors and local board members repeatedly conflated the two.
Councillor Shane Henderson from West Auckland was angry about that. He had trouble accepting the special character areas at all. "We're saying we should lock away 41 per cent of the land within five kilometres of the city centre. That's outrageous. Heritage homes are protected by the legislation. They'll continue, no matter what we do, because we're conflating special character and heritage."
It's unclear why the council did not choose a different route, removing the SCAs altogether, as Parliament may have hoped for, but upgrading the listed heritage protections. The Coalition for More Homes has proposed that option.
Environmental planner Carolyn Hill has written about special character from a different perspective. "Auckland's population is getting younger and more culturally diverse," she says. "These trends present an opportunity for new ways of making a future heritage for the city. Cultures, communities and different age groups need to be celebrated by more than just festivals, arts and sports. They must be built into new neighbourhoods that can permanently house and home them.
"This is already happening in projects such as Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei's Kāinga Tuatahi residential development on tribal land, and Cohaus, a high-density co-housing development in Grey Lynn. Special character may be a part of Tāmaki Makaurau's identity, but it's time for other versions of urban life to be recognised too."
Cohaus is a group of 20 relatively affordable homes that share courtyards and gardens and some other facilities. Residents moved in last year.
Opponents of density in the fringe suburbs say it will only lead to luxury apartment blocks. Councillor John Watson of Albany said on Thursday, "The notion a young family will be able to move into a townhouse on Northcote Point is cruelly misleading."
Henderson replied that analysis by PwC, Sense Partners and the Infrastructure Commission all suggested this wasn't necessarily true. Cohaus provides good evidence they're right. And as all those analysts have noted, the luxury apartments that do get built help relieve the pressure on housing elsewhere, making it a little more affordable in, say, Mt Roskill or Onehunga.
BUT WHAT ABOUT the infrastructure? If density springs up randomly around the city, how will council be able to plan transport, water and sewage to cope with demand? The Government allocated extra funding for infrastructure in the last budget, but Mayor Goff and several councillors argued on Thursday that transport, especially, is a "capacity constraint".
Henderson did not agree. "We've been building suburbs with lousy public transport for years," he said. "Tell me about it. But we can put more routes on if we want to. Transport is not a capacity constraint. Why can't we just put transport where the people are?"
Goff responded that someone has to pay for it. And that, in turn, becomes an argument about what the transport dollars get spent on.
When Ruth Jackson and Trish Deans from the Devonport-Takapuna Local Board addressed council, they argued against any reduction in special character areas. In effect, that meant keeping Devonport, Birkenhead and Northcote Point free from density.
Henderson asked them, "If your board is opposed to development in your area, would it support redirecting public investment into areas taking on more housing?"
Jackson said they had not discussed it.
Councillor Wayne Walker of Albany opposed the reduction in SCAs. The villas, he said, "are representative of what makes Auckland special. We are one of the few cities on the planet where you find a built heritage made of wood, made of trees, and not just any trees, but special trees."
He said villas often "surround the maunga and protect them ... It may be colonial but it harks back to the early history of the area in terms of the maunga."
Councillor Alf Filipaina of Manukau said hearing Walker talk about the maunga like that "nailed it for me". He would be voting to reduce the SCAs, against what Walker wanted.
Tau Henare of the Independent Māori Statutory Board said "protecting one or two villas" wasn't what they should be talking about. "Some of these councillors are just jumping up and down because it's election time. Special character is not the issue. Homelessness and affordability are the issues."
Richard Northey, who chairs the Waitematā Local Board, told the council: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre; c'est de la folie."
He was quoting Pierre Bosquet, a French general during the Crimean War who was referring to the Charge of the Light Brigade: "It is magnificent, but it is not war; it is madness."
What he meant was: There's no point making grand speeches about protecting everything when you're riding into a valley of death and will be slaughtered. Parliament has made it very clear the city must become denser and if the council's response does not conform to the new legal requirements, it will be thrown out.
And if that happens, something even more permissive could be put in its place.
This was the central concern for most councillors too. Desley Simpson of Ōrākei said, "There's a risk that if we don't go far enough, we will lose control of the process."
Goff: "I'm in favour of protecting as much quality housing as possible. I don't think the Government has done the right thing in trying to trade off quality for density. Having said that, I want to work out how to protect as much quality special character as possible. And we will do that in one way only: by persuading the members of the Independent Hearings Panel that our methodology is robust, defensible, credible and in line with what the rules require. If it isn't, they will discard it and we will end up with something worse."
And so, at 9pm on Thursday night, they voted to keep most of the city's special character areas, including in most of the doughnut, but to lose about a quarter, and to adopt the walkable catchments.
Late in the debate, Henderson had this to say. "I want to speak up for people who spent last night in a garage or a car or a couch. I want to speak up for people showing up to a rental with 30 other families where landlords can name their price. I want to speak up for first-home buyers who have stood by heartbroken as their ability to own a home and set down roots with their families has slipped away, month on month, for years."
Stand by for the council election campaign, coming to a suburb near you between now and October.
A selection of cartoons from Herald cartoonist Rod Emmerson over the past year