Latest / Best of Business / Dr Elizabeth Aitken Rose: UOA senior lecturer of Architecture and Planning on the Government's plan to 'flood' the housing market

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Dr Elizabeth Aitken Rose: UOA senior lecturer of Architecture and Planning on the Government's plan to 'flood' the housing market · Best of Business

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  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talks EDB. Follow
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  Speaker 2: Right concerns the government's plan to flood the housing market
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  Speaker 2: could lead to cheap, slum like development. Housing Minister Chris
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  Speaker 2: Bishop this week announced changes aimed at fixing the housing crisis.
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  Speaker 2: Those include improving intensification, scrapping minimum floor areas for apartments,
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  Speaker 2: house growth targets, and requiring cities to expand at the
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  Speaker 2: urban fringe. Doctor Elizabeth aikenrose as a senior lecturer at
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  Speaker 2: the University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning, and
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  Speaker 2: she joins me, Now, good morning, Elizabeth.
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  Speaker 3: Good morning Francesca.
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  Speaker 2: Love you to have you with us. What are your
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  Speaker 2: concerns around these planning changes.
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  Speaker 3: Well, none of them are new. No, this is the
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  Speaker 3: current government's merely continuing what the previous government is doing,
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  Speaker 3: which is largely loosening up land supply in order to
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  Speaker 3: solve every other problem, and in its wake will be
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  Speaker 3: many long term problems.
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  Speaker 2: Such as.
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  Speaker 3: Well as such as such as building on floodplains and
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  Speaker 3: on unstable land and in fact creating communities, or not
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  Speaker 3: creating communities but creating creating sprawl and creating houses of
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  Speaker 3: or places in which people live of very low quality.
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  Speaker 2: Will it make housing more affordable?
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  Speaker 3: No? No, I mean it loosens up. It loosens up
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  Speaker 3: the market in some respects, but it doesn't make We
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  Speaker 3: know that, we know, we know for the last ten
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  Speaker 3: to fifteen years that just land supply alone does not
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  Speaker 3: make housing more affordable.
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  Speaker 2: The loss of farm land. Can we we can't just
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  Speaker 2: keep building not it? Can we?
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  Speaker 3: No? No, we can't, we can't. We really need to
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  Speaker 3: be building for for resilience. We need to be building
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  Speaker 3: on you know, our least productive and most stable worlds,
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  Speaker 3: not on our most productive. We need you know, we're
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  Speaker 3: going to need to have food supplies at are close
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  Speaker 3: to cities.
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  Speaker 2: I think a lot of people probably feel that that mix, though,
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  Speaker 2: of expansion and intensification, it sits well with people because
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  Speaker 2: people are that you don't like one or the other,
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  Speaker 2: and having a mix might sound like a good idea.
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  Speaker 2: Would that would that be true, do you think, Elizabeth Hoo?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah? Well no, having having a mix is definitely what
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  Speaker 3: plans set out to do. They set out to release
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  Speaker 3: land over time, and this is carefully evidence based, not
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  Speaker 3: just evidence based but also based on community consultation, so
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  Speaker 3: there's there's always provision for expansion and growth. And for
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  Speaker 3: decades now we've been trying to encourage intensification and the
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  Speaker 3: Oakland Unitary Plan makes provision for.
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  Speaker 2: Both the expansion and the growth. What kind of pressure
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  Speaker 2: does that put on the council? How do we deal
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  Speaker 2: with the infrastructure and everything else that goes along with
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  Speaker 2: just building the houses in areas like.
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  Speaker 3: This, Well, the infrastructure is the critical problem and its
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  Speaker 3: infrastructure for water supply, for sanitation, for a store, water management,
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  Speaker 3: for education, and for health and we are basically not
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  Speaker 3: keeping up with that. And I think we've got to
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  Speaker 3: really address in Zealand local government funding models, and it's
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  Speaker 3: not just building a new infrastructure, it's actually maintaining the
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  Speaker 3: infrastructure that we.
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  Speaker 2: Have, absolutely, especially when we're intensifying. So how concerned are
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  Speaker 2: you around the standard of building that could be built?
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  Speaker 3: Extremely concerned, extremely concerned. I think the RNA Enabling Act
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  Speaker 3: last year was twenty twenty one was actually a slum
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  Speaker 3: enabling acts for the future. We're not we're not building
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  Speaker 3: places or we have the potential to not build places
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  Speaker 3: that have our high level of amenity in terms of
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  Speaker 3: light and air enough to land around. So the basic
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  Speaker 3: needs to store your rough supens and hang your washing out,
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  Speaker 3: and and we're not that's not being accompanied either by
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  Speaker 3: the development of parks and recreation and so on. You know,
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  Speaker 3: everybody talks about how wonderful Paris is and how people
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  Speaker 3: live in very small apartments there, and they do, but
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  Speaker 3: they also have access to some fabulous community spaces and
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  Speaker 3: and also to you know, over decades or centuries wonderful
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  Speaker 3: mixed mixed use development. So you kind of live in
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  Speaker 3: the city as much as you live in your home
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  Speaker 3: in Paris, whereas in New Zealand we tend to live
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  Speaker 3: in our homes and.
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  Speaker 2: I don't sorry carry on.
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  Speaker 3: So we're built very disconnected cities, so.
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  Speaker 2: We don't want to be shallow about it. But also
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  Speaker 2: there's an esthetic involved in this as well, and we
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  Speaker 2: we kind of end up with these we can in
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  Speaker 2: that with some pretty ugly buildings.
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  Speaker 3: We are ending up with very ugly buildings, very ugly
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  Speaker 3: buildings indeed, and very ugly buildings that are not set
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  Speaker 3: in particularly beautiful streetscapes either.
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  Speaker 2: So was there a better way, Elizabeth?
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  Speaker 3: Yes, Yes, we need to plan for the future and
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  Speaker 3: we need to come to the present as well, and
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  Speaker 3: we need to plan. We need to have infrastructure that
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  Speaker 3: can support the kind of development that we are doing.
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  Speaker 3: And I think we have some very salutary lessons in
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  Speaker 3: terms of the whole leaky building crisis in New Zealand
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  Speaker 3: which post incredible stress and costs on private owners and
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  Speaker 3: then on public owners. No, deregulation does not is not
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  Speaker 3: the solution.
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  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for your time this morning. Appreciate
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  Speaker 2: your thoughts. That was doctor Elizabeth Aikenrowe, Senior Lecturer at
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  Speaker 2: the University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning, can
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  Speaker 2: to hear your thoughts about how you're feeling about these
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  Speaker 2: changes that the government has announced around housing as well.
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