Residents find it 'daunting' to weigh in on future of housing
Saturday, 22 July 2023
It’s a legalistic, technical process that challenges even the most organised of residents’ groups. But it will also determine the future of housing in Wellington for the next 20 years.
Welcome to the hearings on Wellington’s Proposed District Plan, where independent commissioners will decide where you can build a house or an apartment building, how tall it will be, and whether there should be any regulation of what it looks like.
The housing plans were hotly debated around the Wellington City Council table, with accusations of NIMBYism and party-politicking, but the process didn’t end with those years of deliberation.
The final step in the process is the legally required hearings which have been running since the start of the year. Once they’re over, the commissioners will make recommendations which the council can choose to accept or reject.
Even for the residents committed enough to have followed the district plan all the way through, the court-style hearings can feel overwhelming.
Jane O’Loughlin is the convenor of Live Wellington, a group pushing for “density done well” — lower building heights and carefully selected areas where apartment blocks can be built.
The Proposed District Plan itself is more than 1000 pages long. O’Loughlin’s work on the submissions has “taken a real toll”, she said, consuming her mornings, evenings and weekends. Seemingly innocuous details could have significant ramifications, she has found.
“This is the crunchy end of the whole process, this is the bit you’ve gotta be involved in.”
The challenge was what Newtown resident James Barber described as a “mind-numbing” amount of information.
He became involved after being handed a flyer about the need to preserve character housing at a school fair.
After reading about the pro-character views, he thought they had a “fundamental misunderstanding”: they believed that character houses, villas in areas like Berhampore and Mt Victoria, were places families could afford to live.
Barber’s family home is a one bedroom apartment on Russell Terrace, where he lives with his partner and two children. He could only buy the apartment with the help of family.
“People talking about these issues had a different life when they settled down and had families because they could afford an actual house and a yard,” Barber said.
“That’s not an accessible opportunity for people in younger generations.”
O’Loughlin was outraged last week to discover that government housing agency Kāinga Ora had spent $800,000 on legal and planning experts for the hearings. She said it was impossible for groups of residents, who could not pay for experts, to compete.
Kāinga Ora was pushing for higher building heights in many suburbs, to maximise the amount of housing built.
Urban planning and design manager for Kāinga Ora Katja Lietz said it was “really important to invest time and expertise to make sure we are fulfilling our mandate to help enable the best potential housing outcomes for communities now and in the future”.
O’Loughlin said Wellingtonians could wake up to find their suburbs have been upzoned in accordance with Kāinga Ora’s request — five storeys allowed in Karori, six in Kelburn, 11 in Aro Valley, and 14 in Mt Cook.
“We would all go ‘Oh my god’, no one would be even vaguely aware that this is occurring.”
Other government agencies and departments have not spent as much as Kāinga Ora. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Development paid $10,394 for lawyers, Corrections spent $68,000, state-owned enterprise KiwiRail spent $30,000.
Waka Kotahi could not confirm how much it had spent without an official information request. Heritage New Zealand had internal heritage experts, so didn’t have to spend on external consultants.
Community groups rarely have the money to hire experts to support their argument. Their main weapon in the hearings is time: cataloguing character houses in their neighbourhoods and researching their history, spending hours discussing their presentations and poring over maps.
Student teacher Henry Lockhart, also of Vic Young Labour, said the time and effort required meant the hearings were dominated by people who could take time off work to prepare and show up. No one from a hospitality or retail job would be able to have that flexibility, he said.
Lockhart video-called into the hearing from his lunch break at a school in Porirua.
“It’s very obvious to me from the previous stages that the process has been dominated by conservative forces and residents’ groups,” he said.
Even though he was a “massive nerd for this stuff” he considered backing out simply because of the masses of reading — about technical details like boundary set backs, recession planes, design guides, and realisable capacity of housing.
Lockhart eventually followed through because he felt obliged to “make sure there were some young, progressive, pro-housing perspectives coming into it”.
Newtown residents Claire Nolan and Margaret Franken became involved because of what Nolan described as “the overwhelming sense of injustice” when the council decided to reduce Newtown’s character areas by 75%.
Character housing was a “hot topic” in the hearings. Under Wellington’s current character rules, many houses in suburbs like Berhampore or Thorndon cannot be demolished without resource consent and redevelopment must maintain the low-rise, villa-style character of the area — effectively stopping terraced housing or apartment building developments in these areas.
The proposed district plan reduced the number of character houses by thousands across the city, to free up space for development. But many submitters, including the council’s own staff, said this went too far.
“We wanted to front up because Newtown’s our home. A lot of the houses are quite good, they’re not mouldy, they’re not falling down,” Nolan said.
If the council had been willing to listen and put some of the homes back into character areas, she said the Newtown group probably would have dropped the issue and “gone away”.
The councillors voted to slash the character areas, so Nolan soldiered on. The process had been “daunting” and exhausting, she said, with the group participating in three rounds of hearings so far. She reckoned after three years of learning about city planning she should get a degree in it.
Franken, a linguistics academic, said the process could be “disheartening”, because the council could choose to disregard the recommendations of commissioners.
It wasn’t an even playing field either, she thought, given that government agencies and private companies were spending thousands for experts to back up their submissions.
In virtually every suburb there is a residents’ association or informal group who are hoping to preserve more character homes in their area. Across the city the requests add up to restoring thousands of homes back into the character-protected areas where development is limited.
Michael McAdam from Generation Zero said homeowners with vested economic interests in their neighbourhood were naturally more likely to band together and fight to preserve the status quo. Renters, who were more affected by the housing crisis, were less likely to show up because they didn’t have a specific house or suburb to protect.
The debate over character housing was one of the major reasons Generation Zero became involved in the hearings.
“While character housing is not the cause of the housing crisis, it’s certainly a contributor and so we choose to go and try and make sure there is a voice speaking for all those who can’t, who don’t have a vested interest in the status quo,” McAdam said.
He’d found it a complicated process. “We’re a group of politically engaged individuals but you have to be so teed in with the council.”
Lockhart struggled to bring other students on board in Vic Young Labour because the hearings were “so dense”.
“You really have to upskill yourself and that’s a huge ask on people … It weeds it down to people who have lots of time and prior knowledge, which tends to be conservative older people who have a vested interest.”