Newtown should do housing legwork, say local leaders

Sunday, 11 February 2024

Despite plans identifying it as a prime spot for housing, Wellington's Adelaide Rd today (right image) looks the same as it did in 2007 (left image).

A watercolour artist’s impressions of Adelaide Rd from 2008 show that it has long been a site of housing hopes for the city. The picture is one of a leafy, tree-lined street with apartments and businesses on either side.

But 17 years after the council published that image in the Adelaide Road Framework, the skyline of the road has hardly changed.

Recent recommendations from the Independent Hearings Panel, a group of commissioners tasked with making recommendations on Wellington’s District Plan, have knocked back the council’s plan to include Adelaide Rd as part of a centre city zone.

Instead the Panel has zoned it as mixed use – meaning that while the height limit is the same, the priority is businesses in the area and housing “to a lesser extent”.

In the surrounding suburbs of Mt Cook, Newtown, and Berhampore the Panel has controversially put hundreds of homes into character areas, including main streets such as Rintoul St, Wallace St and Adelaide Rd. By far the most character homes were reinstated in Newtown.

The Panel’s recommendations have been panned for suggesting that expanded character areas and less upzoning would have no effect on the affordability of homes in Wellington.

Tamatha Pauls says Wellington needs to upzone everywhere, not just where it’s palatable. (File photo)

Local MP Tamatha Paul said the recommendations would “lock in the status quo of a housing emergency” and make things tougher for all renters and people in social housing. Newtown, in particular, was a place which could do a lot of “housing legwork” for the city.

“My message to councillors is we need to zone everywhere, not just where it’s palatable,” she said.

As they stand, the recommendations push Wellington’s growth into Kilbirnie, Tawa and Johnsonville – areas which were further away from the central city, increasing emissions as people commuted to work.

Regional councillor Thomas Nash said the report should send alarm bells to anyone who wanted Wellington to be thriving and prosperous. He was seriously concerned that if the recommendations were followed, Wellington’s population would continue to decline compared to the rest of the region.

Newtown and the inner-city suburbs in general were critical to growth and reducing emissions because they were close to transport links and had the infrastructure required to support housing, he said.

In the region’s future development strategy, drafted last year, the corridor from Courtenay Place to Island Bay would hold 20% of the region’s growth over the next 30 years, or another 19,000 homes.

Life in the city will get very expensive for ratepayers if there’s no room for more people, says Thomas Nash.

Without more people and more homes, especially in well-connected areas like Newtown and Mt Victoria, existing ratepayers were going to pay the cost of 30 years of underinvestment.

“If the decision is to continue to constrain housing development within the centre of Wellington City, it will make living in Wellington extremely expensive and impossible for many people,” Nash said.

Paul urged the city councillors to consider a wholesale rejection of the recommendations and sending them to the Minister for the Environment, Penny Simmonds, for a rewrite.

Council staff were looking into that as an option, The Post understands, but councillors were continuing to push to make specific changes to retain some control over the process.

Jane O’Loughlin, convenor of “density done well” group LIVEWELLington, said it would be disappointing if the council rejected “the will of Wellingtonians for a second time” in regards to character areas.

Contrary to Paul, O’Loughlin believed that the Panel’s recommendations made a lot of change to the status quo and anyone looking for a denser city should celebrate. Overall, the plan allowed higher buildings and less protection for character areas.

“This time, we have been through a massive, lengthy and expensive process, involving very experienced independent commissioners, not to mention the input of hundreds of hours from submitters, and because the outcome doesn’t please some councillors, they are trying to reject it.”

Newtown local Claire Nolan showed up to the hearings, representing a group of locals who advocated for character protections.

A medium-density development next to a villa on Constable St, Newtown.

“We see this as fair and that there has been a robust process, a legal process, with an expert, very experienced panel, submitters and experts on all sides.”

She believed that leaving 30% of the suburb available for development was more than sufficient – “zoning any more than the large amount we already have is not going to provide any more homes”.

It was clear from the council’s economic report that character areas would make a minimal difference on the capacity for housing, which was the reason the Panel had added houses back into the protected areas, Nolan said.

It had been shameful to see an orchestrated campaign to attack the commissioners who wrote the recommendations, O’Loughlin said.

“Those concerned about the recommendations should gain some perspective … This is a least-regrets decision that allows further changes to be made in the future – it’s very hard to down-zone an area once it has been upzoned.”

Paul said there were flaws with the hearing process itself. Suburban groups and residents who submitted tended to be well-resourced and able to pay for lawyers, architects and experts, meaning wealthy suburbs were over-represented.

“We shouldn’t cherry pick which areas we think should and shouldn’t share the responsibility of a growing population, otherwise it’ll be the poor areas that take all the new housing while the well-resourced communities remain the same.

“If we zone everywhere, that means more potential opportunities for housing to be.”