Red tape review opens door for skyscrapers in Hamilton CBD
Sunday, 18 August 2019
The sky is the limit for Hamilton's city centre as onerous bureaucracy looks to be consigned to the scrap heap.
A Hamilton City Council plan change is proposing to remove height restrictions in the heart of the central city.
Developers who take up the opportunity would still have to apply for a resource consent and meet urban design guidelines but height is no longer an issue, said council project manager Debra Stan-Barton.
'In the centre of the central city, we've removed the height limit so if you want to build to the moon, let's take a look,' Stan-Barton said.
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The move comes as a result of the Regulatory Effectiveness and Efficiency Programme, dubbed the red tape review, which kicked off in 2017. Mayor Andrew King initiated it but six months later it was tangled up in council bureaucracy
The proposed plan change is now out for public consultation.
Under the proposals large chunks of the district plan could be deleted, with bullet point after bullet point slashed from the books - making it easier to use.
In total, 77 recommendations are being made with more work to come in future.
'Based on previous years' research, if you put these changes in, you will probably need about 80 less resource consents per year and that adds up to time and money,' Stan-Barton said.
The current height restriction in the city is 32m, about 10 storeys, but can be exceeded with bonuses. The Tower building on Ward St is 53m high. Auckland's Sky Tower is 328m, Wellington's Majestic Centre is 116m and the Beehive is 72m.
Brian White of Edwards White Architects, said taller buildings are the way of the future for the city.
'There are some amazing possibilities,' White said.' The views you get of the city from that height, or when you go up to the ninth floor of council and looking across the city, it's actually really beautiful, there is just so much greenery. We'd actually be able to design buildings that would capture all of that.'
It would also bring more residential living into the city to help boost business, he said.
'Retail in the central city does struggle, if we are all being real about it, and if we had more density and more people in the city there would be a stronger case for that retail to be a bit better.'
But the cost of going up will be matched by the amount of concrete and steel needed in the ground. Waikato's peat soil is soft - there is no hard pan to support high-rise.
'The reality is in the Hamilton CBD there is an economics question to answer as well as from a geo-technical perspective,' said Foster's Construction Group chief executive Leonard Gardner.
The removal of barriers to development is a positive move, though, he said.
Hamilton Mayor Andrew King said the high-rise would allow for more jobs.
'It's jobs and housing. The two have to go together,' King said.
'We're the third smallest territorial authority in the whole of New Zealand by land area and the fourth biggest by population. Hamilton has 170,000 people and we are really tight. We haven't got a lot of land left.'
'We have got some land where we can have the traditional type house on a full section but we also need our duplexes, we need our apartments and we need our high-rise accommodation in town.'
Public consultation on the Proposed Plan Change 6 is open until Monday, September 2, 2019 at 4.30pm.