Floods and frustration: When climate resilience meets resident resistance
Sunday, 4 May 2025
Auckland Council proposes to turn a golf course into a wetland as part of a $2 billion flood mitigation programme, but neighbours are rallying against it, claiming it will ruin their property values, reports Jonathan Killick.
Emma Hulse loves living next to the Takapuna Golf Course - she regularly takes her dogs for walks on the grounds, rain, hail or shine.
“It’s great, you just have to dodge the golf balls that might be flying around,” she tells the Sunday Star-Times. “It’s just a really beautiful, very serene piece of green in an otherwise built-up area.”
But, Hulse says she was shocked to learn from a notice in the paper of plans to excavate her slice of paradise into a wetland basin capable of holding 550 million litres of water.
“It’s going to look terrible … filled with shopping trolleys, rats and mosquitoes in stagnant water. That’s a real concern.”
And Hulse has heard that wetlands bring ducks, meaning the possibility of avian botulism - “I’ve got a labrador and she’ll be eating the duck poo. Not good.”
Her fears may not sound like a national issue but they’re emblematic of deep fault lines emerging over the future of New Zealand’s property stock, where sacrifices will be made as we inevitably meet climate change head-on.
This week has seen Christchurch enter a state of emergency as floodwaters closed roads and forced evacuations, while Wellington was brought to a standstill by 150kph winds.
Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell told media it was the ninth state of emergency he had attended since taking office.
The scenes are all too familiar to those in Auckland, where the city is still dealing with damage two years after the disastrous Anniversary Weekend floods.
Between the council and Government, $2 billion has been allocated to recovery efforts, but it’s slow going with around 608 of 1215 “high risk” properties having been bought out so far.
Future-proofing our largest city is going to require a “blue-green network” of properties, turned back over to nature, ready to “sponge up” moisture in the next big weather event, says council’s Healthy Waters.
Takapuna’s Emma Hulse, meanwhile, says she’s “not opposed to better flood protection”, but believes the council’s proposal has been “rushed through”.
“It’s irreplaceable recreational and it’s something that we really need to take a look at carefully.”
Residents have rallied, with Hulse being the spokesperson of a new group that claims to represent the interest of “hundreds” of concerned locals. They’ve engaged a PR firm and are lobbying local MPs.
On Wednesday next week they’re holding a public meeting where Ben Macky of Sotheby’s International Realty North Shore will warn that the wetland could knock 15% off capital values.
“This isn’t a typical suburb. You’re talking about premium real estate in one of Auckland’s most desirable coastal communities,” he says in a statement to the Star-Times.
“When you remove something as significant as a golf course, you’re not just changing the view, you’re removing part of what people are willing to pay a premium for.”
In a suburb where the average home is worth $1.94m, he suggests that across 4707 dwellings the potential losses in value could amount to billions.
Meanwhile, golf club superintendent Stephen Dowd feels that golf courses are being unfairly “scapegoated” in Auckland because of a perception that they’re “elitist”.
“We hear it all the time. They think it’s an elite group of retired old white men who play golf, and it couldn’t be farther from the truth at this place … It’s a lot of young people, tradies, women and families.”
He says 260,000 visitors play on the course each year, as the sport increases in popularity, straining sparse facilities. The Takapuna course also returns $330,000 to the council annually.
“And, we were here long before any houses got developed in Wairau or Milford. They developed the land and sold it, knowing it was in a flood zone … now it’s fired back in their faces.”
The club has come with an alternative plan which Dowd says will keep everyone happy. At a cost of around $60 million, basins contoured around the 18 holes will detain the same amount of water, he says.
They took that counter-proposal straight to the top, and successfully convinced a committee of councillors to instruct Health Waters to go back and assess its facility. A result is due back in June.
Says Dowd: “We just couldn’t believe they didn’t come to us [in the first place] … they just said here’s a golf course, let’s excavate it.”
“I’ve got a neighbour who has lived here 70 years and has seen that level of flood once. It’s not an everyday occurrence … We might do this flood retention and it might never be used.”
Healthy Waters’ head of flood resilience Tom Mansell respectfully disagrees.
He says a hundred different “interventions” were considered, and the golf course proposal had risen to the top as “a unique opportunity”, reducing downstream flow by 30% for 200 properties including North Shore Hospital.
And he suggests time is ticking with funds chipped in by the Government being awarded on a ‘use or lose it’ basis.
“This one-off chance allows us to undertake critical works that would otherwise be delayed or infeasible due to reliance on ratepayer funding alone. It is crucial that we leverage this funding while it is available.”
“Failure to move this project forward would mean missing out on vital Crown support and potentially slower project delivery, leaving homes, lives and businesses at considerable risk.”
That sense of urgency is shared by Bronwyn Bound of the Sunnynook Community Centre who supported families of two North Shore residents who lost their lives during the historic floods.
“We are in support of urgency, and things need to be done yesterday … no talking, we just need action, and we need it now.”
One of the deceased, Wairau Valley’s Daniel Miller, was found washed down a culvert, after it was believed he had been checking on neighbouring residents.
“The fear is still there that nothing has been done and the heavy rains are coming down. If we get a weather bomb over the Wairau catchment, we are in big trouble again,” says Bound.
She says there has been a call to set aside petty arguments between golfers and council and “get it done”.
“Milford residents are saying ‘We don’t care what you do with that golf course, as long as you do something to help mitigate what happened two years ago’.
“I think for those people that lived through it, they should be the ones that are listened to. They are just so traumatised and they have a right to be because the event we all went through over that weekend was horrific.”
Dr Maria Armoudian, co-director of Auckland University’s Ngā Ara Whetū centre for climate, biodiversity and society, says these highly-charged debates are only going to become more common.
“There are some very hard conversations that need to be had … There are already some parts of the United States that are uninsurable because of floods, hurricanes and fires and we don’t want to be that.
“Keep in mind that long-term values will really be nothing if we don’t mitigate - nature is the ultimate arbiter.”
Armoudian says one way to make these tough calls is to use “deliberative democracy”, where a random sample of people is selected to learn about the problem, consider the pros and cons, and then decide, similar to a court jury.
“It’s a model that makes better decisions because you have a representative sample of community, not just a handful of loud voices concerned about one issue.”
North Shore councillor Richard Hills is ready to face those voices at the upcoming residents meeting. It’s one of two local flooding-focused events he’s attending on Wednesday night.
He came out early in support of the golf course redevelopment proposal, and he intends to defend it.
“It remains to be seen whether flood mitigation projects reduce property value. I would have thought it’s actually the floodplain and the risk that reduces market value,” he tells the Star-Times.
“Unfortunately we are going to see [value losses] around our valleys and floodplains as more people realise they won’t want to purchase property if it puts their families at risk.”
As a former chair of the council’s parks committee, it’s unlikely that the significance of removing already dwindling recreational space is lost on Hills, especially within his own constituency ahead of an election.
“You can understand people feeling upset that they are losing something … [But], a lot of people who weren’t affected [by floods] don’t realise quite how badly others were.”
“When you have two metres of water, people climbing on their roofs and older people wheeling each other out in rubbish bins to get to safety, it seems like the sort of thing from a disaster movie, but it’s happening in our streets, in Auckland.”
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