Wellingtonians are concerned about the ‘top-down’ free-market approach to urban planning. The Government has effectively imposed high-density rezoning on communities from above, with limited potential for exemptions, under the National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD).

Next year WCC will publicly notify its Draft District Plan to deliver on the NPS-UD’s requirements, but there will be limited scope for individuals and communities to influence final decisions through submissions.

Thousands of Wellingtonians discovered their substantive submissions opposing the Spatial Plan (the policy precursor) were ignored by elected representatives. Councillors followed the political dictats (issued through the media by party leaders days before the 24 June vote), and accordingly voted for a maximum deregulation of planning rules in heritage and other suburbs.

A majority of councillors also voted to reject the advice of Council staff and to increase the city centre’s “walkable catchment” in which at least 6 storey height limits will apply.

The new expanded, 15 minute area means 6 storeys up to the top of the Brooklyn Hill, up the slopes of Wadestown and Kelburn, and all of Mt Victoria, Mt Cook, The Terrace and Aro Valley.

Widespread areas in Newtown, Berhampore, Tawa, Johnsonville, and Onslow are all slated for 6 storeys or more as well. Very small character precincts with lower height levels will remain (just 15.5% of Berhampore and 26.8% of Newtown for example).

If Councillors get second thoughts and decide to backtrack on the deregulated planning approach, Kainga Ora stands ready to litigate to enforce compliance with the NPS-UD. It successfully did so in the High Court against Auckland planning commissioners adopting their Unitary plan some years ago.

The NPS-UD fundamentally undermines democracy, local decision-making and urban planning, which considers those perspectives in a local environmental context.

One of the Government’s main gripes has been that residents have used the RMA to object to new development on the basis that it reduces their neighbourhood “amenity values”.

As a result, the exposure draft of the new Natural and Built Environment Bill, which will replace the RMA, eliminates amenity values, and weakens the legal basis for heritage protection.

Submissions on the Bill close on 4 August and it’s important to call for heritage to be a matter which must be included in the proposed National Planning Framework. That’s the detailed policy on planning which the new 14 Councils will be required to adopt in their plans.

After the Productivity Commission report in 2015, Phil Twyford (then opposition spokesperson on housing) and Oliver Hartwich, CE of The New Zealand Initiative (and successor to the Business Roundtable) issued their joint manifesto to solve the housing crisis. In their Herald opinion piece of 29 November 2015 they set out “three modest ideas”:

● Remove the urban/rural city land boundary (enable sprawl),
● Free up density and height planning rules and “let the market discover where and how people want to live”, and
● Shift the cost of infrastructure away from developers.

Under the Government’s Urban Development Agenda, these ideas have since been implemented with little fanfare or media attention. The result is a radical reshaping of New Zealand’s planning laws.

In time, the native timber buildings of the old Wellington suburbs, (already among the most dense in New Zealand), will be clear felled for sun-stealers. Student tenants and low-income renters will find the expensive new builds unaffordable and snapped up by the usual suspects.

What’s so strange is that the advocates for this were young folks of Generation Zero, worried about carbon emissions from sprawl and low-income renters suffering housing shortages and extreme prices.

How did these groups get on board with the free market deregulators? Why would they want to “let the market discover where and how people wish to live”?

The Government’s radical reforms were adopted with little to no debate and treated in a low key way by media. There was little information about the new Infrastructure Funding Act (passed during COVID months in 2020), achieving the third modest idea.

Similarly the NPS-UD, implementing the second modest idea, was adopted as a directive to local government during 2020 COVID months without much attention.

During the October 2020 election campaign, Tracy Martin told Ohariu voters, concerned about the removal of density and height rules in Onslow, that NZ First Ministers were unaware of the contents of the NPS-UD when it went through Cabinet in June last year. So it seems the low profile was not just with the public.

At successive intervals, during Twyford’s Urban Growth Agenda reforms, NZ Initiative staff have cheered him on in their Newshub columns picked up by other media outlets. Wellington’s Spatial Plan controversy was fueled by grassroots, or ‘astroturf’, organisations led by Labour’s PR apparatchik Neale Jones.

It’s a return to the 1980s when it took just a few years to demolish the architectural face of Wellington city built up over a hundred years as our seat of mercantile commerce and government. Now post GFC and COVID, a lot of empty box office towers need to be repurposed into residential complexes with some new green space on Lambton Quay.

At heart is a government policy response to unaffordable houses. It’s a response to the million migrants to Aotearoa/New Zealand in the past 20 years without commensurate home building. That’s been exacerbated by asset price inflation from $55 billion of money printed in the past 12 months.

Boris Johnson is pushing through radical deregulated planning laws in the English Parliament. In recent weeks 90 Tory backbenchers have expressed doubts and the Labour Party is encouraging them to revolt. Could something similar happen here?

Felicity Wong is chair of Historic Places Wellington.