My backyard or yours? The housing war splitting Auckland

Sunday, 7 September 2025

Auckland’s new housing laws have ignited a bitter battle over neighbourhood character, backyard rights, and generational futures. As angry meetings erupt and political tensions boil, Jonathan Killick investigates a city experiencing growing pains

The first that Kohimarama couple John and Wendy Lowe knew about the townhouses next door was when they were summoned to a meeting in their driveway with a council engineer.

They tell the Sunday Star-Times that losing their afternoon sun is bad enough, but now they’re required to give the private developer access to their backyard to put in a pipe.

“It’s like we’re being raped and pillaged twice - the development and now this,” says John Lowe.

Adds Wendy: “it just seems wrong that you can take away somebody's enjoyment of their home by putting some monstrosity next door, and never mind that it's going to shade the neighbours or take away privacy.”

As one house becomes four on the neighbouring site, the region’s under pressure infrastructure necessitates an upgrade, and the Lowe’s backyard has been identified as the optimal location for a new stormwater pipe.

They’ve come up against a little known council policy that allows developers to effectively borrow the powers of the Local Government Act to require neighbour’s to provide access. No compensation required.

Their’s will not be an isolated case. Quiet backyards will increasingly be the new battleground as home-owners come up against a central government push for urban intensification and housing growth.

Tensions boiled over at a meeting in Mt Eden last week; during the heated debate, Ōrākei Local Board member Troy Churton pointed “finger guns” at Heritage Minister Paul Goldsmith, accusing the Government of “putting a gun to he head” of Auckland Council.

Behind the anger lies a sweeping policy mandate — one that could change the shape of Auckland for generations.

Churton tells the Star-Times he now regrets “the [gun] metaphor”, but the point remains. By law Auckland Council must decide on a new plan for where to put 2 million extra dwellings, and consult on it by October 10. Tough choices will have to be made.

New maps show the central city ‘character’ suburbs from Remuera to Mt Albert zoned for 10 to 15-storey apartment buildings. Anywhere within an 800-metre “walkable catchment” of a train station or town centre is fair game for developers.

At the Mt Eden meeting, attendees were told by local elected reps that they needed to “saturate” RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop with emails expressing their objection to the “indecent haste”.

“These are not just nice old homes, they give our suburbs an identity … to sweep that away with zoning removes Auckland’s soul, and it’s being done by people in Wellington who don’t understand what we value,” Albert-Eden Local Board chair Kendyl Smith said.

But not everyone was in agreement. One young member of the audience stood and told the crowd: “You know what feels like having a gun to your head? It’s a generation that refuses to bow down because of its property values.”

A city under pressure

How did we get here? In 2021 the Labour government brought in new density standards that would have allowed three dwellings of three storeys by right on basically any property in Auckland, resulting in “plan change 78”.

After Cyclone Gabrielle and the Anniversary Weekend Floods, it was agreed between Auckland’s councillors and the new coalition government that not everywhere was suited for high density development - but a change to the rules has come with a catch.

Albert-Eden councillor Christine Fletcher calls Bishop’s latest requirement to zone for an equivalent amount of houses in order to be able to stop building in floodplains a “poison chalice”.

“It’s just a figure that both Labour and National have plucked from the air and both have blood on their hands for it,” she tells the Star-Times.

Since Parliament passed the requirements into law on August 20 council planners have been working overtime to meet the deadline, she says.

“It’s not enough time to finesse zones or precincts, let alone infrastructure. If National are serious about re-election, they should really think about what they’re wanting to impose on Aucklanders,” says Fletcher.

She told the Mt Eden meeting the extra capacity in her ward alone would require $23 billion in infrastructure spend, and their rates would likely reflect it.

Urban design blogger and Waitematā candidate Patrick Reynolds calls the debate “hysterical” and accuses veteran councillors of a misinformation campaign.

“It’s just outrageous entitlement - that the already well housed considering themselves to be suffering some terrible abuse is just self-indulgent.”

“My core frustration with [incumbents like] Fletcher is they have been at the absolute centre for Auckland for 30 years. Every election they pop out to say it’s broken … they’re the ones who have done it.”

“They voted for the City Rail Link and Central Interceptor [waste pipe] - those two things provide all of this infrastructure that we need to intensify.”

Minister Bishop, meanwhile, says Auckland Council has been using “every excuse in the book to stall progress”.

“The idea that a plan change that enables 2 million homes is suddenly going to result in 2 million homes being built in the short-term is, frankly, nuts,” he tells the Star-Times.

“It is an indisputable fact that more housing leads to more affordable housing. I hope that’s what we all want for Auckland.”

But the Government and Auckland council seem to be increasingly at odds over how to get there; both the minister, and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, are backing greenfields development over intensification in suburbs like Parnell.

Fletcher doesn’t accept that the city can’t “have it’s cake and eat it too”, if only a a more reasonable target like 900,000 dwellings could be work-shopped over time.

“Make it functional and acceptable and not cause rioting in the streets,” she says.

She suggests to the Star-Times that the solution may be to openly flout legislation by withdrawing PC78 and refusing to meet the deadline for a new plan.

Epsom MP David Seymour says the council may have been given a deadline - “however the only consequence for not meeting it is that the Minister may intervene, or not”, he told constituents.

He later tells the Star-Times: “Bish is one of the few politicians outside of the ACT MPs who I think is actually thinking hard about these issues, and I’ve got a lot of confidence he’ll come to the right place.”

While Seymour, like all other politicians spoken to for this report agrees that intensification is needed, he insists it’s not best suited for Parnell or the slopes of Remuera.

“Parnell is New Zealand’s oldest suburb and underneath it are a whole lot of sewers made from bricks in the early 1900s … Two years ago we had a small building fall into a sinkhole when the sewer imploded.”

He points out that Manukau Road is already zoned for seven storeys, but remains “overwhelmingly run down single level flats”. He and fellow Epsom local Paul Goldsmith also suggest there is an alternative - more “greenfield” development at the rural edges.

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown is having none of it, telling the Star-Times that the “desperate deputy prime minister” shouldn’t “stick his nose in it”.

“So they want to build out in Pukekohe so they can get re-elected in Epsom? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?” says Brown.

Reynolds is equally scathing: “That’s frankly scurrilous behaviour by an apparent libertarian to carve out regulatory protection for his electorate.”

Brown says intensification is just part of becoming a modern city: “In Sydney, everybody lives in an apartment unless you’re really, really rich.”

“We should intensify where we’ve got good transport corridors. We’ve just wasted $6 billion building this bloody railway set. It won’t pay if we don’t get more people on it.”

A generational rift: Who gets to live here

Caitlin Wilson, a 21-year-old running for Waitematā Local Board says she can’t imagine herself owning a house anywhere in Auckland the way things are going, let alone being able to live in the city centre.

“From my perspective, and people I talk to, young people are feeling frustrated and we often feel very powerless in these debates.

“Young people don’t see intensification as a threat, it’s a necessary solution to allow us to stay in the city and continue our studies, our work. And I just don’t think doing nothing is an option.”

In the outer suburbs, the anger is just as raw.

Shane Henderson - a ‘young’ councillor at age 38 - took aim at “the wealthy, the rich and powerful in central city areas” at a debate this week in Waitākere.

“Over decades housing growth in areas like Remuera and St Heliers has been artificially held down so that you have low rise in some of the best land for housing, close to jobs and public transport,” he says.

“We have a housing crisis, so where do those [new] houses go? They have to go somewhere, so they go to West Auckland. We take on more growth than any other place.”

Mayor Brown told the Star-Times he was trying to take a “moderate” position in reassuring voters that while change was inevitable, it wouldn’t affect the majority of residents in their lifetime.

“We only build 20,000 [dwellings] in Auckland per year, so there’s 100 years to get to 2 million. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”

He said it was just unfortunate that the issue had come up during the election, suggesting it had been “hijacked by desperate people”.

“Scaring people about something that isn’t going to happen is always a good way to be re-elected.”

A shadow over their garden

For the Lowes it’s not just a debate. It’s their backyard and it’s happening today.

It’s their retirement nest egg and they’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in “making the place nice” for themselves.

Looking down her street Wendy Lowe questions “who is going to buy one of those [new townhouses]?”

“Who is going to pay that kind of money for a place that’s horrible and crammed in. They’re building all these houses, but are people actually going to want to move into them?”