New chief city planner has a house - now he needs a plan to help others get one
Friday, 22 January 2021
Liam Hodgetts understands the pain of Wellington’s would-be home owners.
He stood shoulder to shoulder with them in long open-home queues, shared the shock at Wellington’s dizzying property prices, and also considered a lengthy commute as a compromise for finding a home for his family of four.
And finally, after seven unsuccessful bids, the Wellington City Council’s new chief planning officer received the early Christmas present of an offer accepted and a Wadestown home secured.
So he knows well the issues facing the capital, if not yet all the answers to fix them.
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For those, however, the city appears to have the right person to set about finding them.
Hodgetts has worked on big, complex projects, including London’s Channel Tunnel rail link, where the then young Kiwi helped plan tunnelling under East London, and the liaison with a nervous community.
During 14 years in Melbourne he was at the heart of efforts to fix its housing crisis.
“Housing affordability was a real pressing issue,” he said. “It was similar to the situation here, with concerns about affordability, about the income of families and ability to service debt.”
And in his previous role, as head of strategy at New Plymouth District Council, Hodgetts brought together disparate public, private and iwi groups to create a regional economic strategy.
He’ll need all of those skills, and more, after taking on his new role in October.
Let’s Get Wellington Moving, the multi-billion plan to revamp the capital’s transport, is part of his brief, although he has limited influence on its velocity. The city’s spatial and district plans, essentially where and how the city will squeeze in homes for the growing population, are key objectives over the next year and will be tested by political whim, public resistance and the Government’s own agenda for urban development.
And on top of it all, the city is struggling with a perception that it has lost its mojo and momentum.
But Hodgetts is a “glass half-full” kinda guy. He’s having none of it.
“Lost its mojo? I find that bizarre,” he said.
“From an outsider coming in, I have never been in a more alive city. I’m an Aucklander and I don’t want to live in Auckland. I want to live in Wellington.”
Neither is he fazed by building tensions over densification, its potential impact on the city’s prized character suburbs, and fears for the future look and feel of the capital.
“That’s awesome, the fact that you have that amount of passion and level of engagement is a really good, powerful thing for you to harness, for great outcomes.
“Call it naive and overly ambitious, but my glass half-full version of the world is that I want to bring those…polarised aspects of the community to a point where they can see each other’s views and perspectives, and out of that get a plan that has been done by them.”
Optimistic he may be, but Hodgetts knows that any moves towards densification, particularly in sensitive suburbs Thorndon and Mt Victoria, will leave others seeing a glass half-empty.
Especially when the council and government, through its National Policy Statement on Urban Development, have laid out a clear path towards more medium and high-density housing to accommodate tens of thousands more people over the next few decades.
“Winners and losers? That’s planning,” he said.
“There’s going to be give and take on both sides. There will be changes that will protect character and there will be changes that will densify neighbourhoods.”
Those communities affected will have a hand in designing how that shift looks.
“This is the next phase of planning for which there is no rulebook,” he said, “sitting down, hopefully striking a balance and some sort of mutual understanding of why we are growing, how we need to manage growth and what that growth outcome might look like…sort of a co-designed mission really.”
Finding that balance was possible. Hodgetts had seen it in the “vertical suburbs” of Melbourne.
“The architectural design of some of their hi-rise developments, the time and effort they’ve put into detailed design around aesthetics, amenity for the residents living there, but also for people moving in and around the space.”
He also liked what had been done in San Francisco - “the older areas and how they have integrated character into the growth of the city”.
But the council can’t do this alone.
Hodgetts will be building relationships with government and local bodies for a region-wide approach to the crisis.
And developers.
As part of its Build Wellington project, the council is working with property developers to convert commercial office space into apartments and affordable rentals for “key sector workers - teachers and nurses”.
“It’s an exciting space to be: pragmatic, actual outcomes being delivered where the market technically is not providing for at the moment.”
Exciting. Pragmatic. Outcomes. Not words normally associated with the capital’s housing opportunities.
Hodgetts, like his bosses, will be under pressure to deliver on those words.
Otherwise, that glass half full will quickly lose water.