Capital Crossroads: The housing puzzle
Saturday, 28 March 2026
Capital Crossroads is a four-part series examining the pressures facing Wellington – and what it will take for the capital to thrive again. Read part one here.
Between Churton Park and Tawa is a potential greenfield development waiting to happen - it’s called Upper Stebbings.
There’s room for more than 500 new homes - essentially a whole new suburb - as long as the infrastructure is in place.
It’s part of the Wellington City Council’s district plan. But there have been plans afoot for years.
There are others called Glenside and Lincolnshire Farm - also waiting in the wings. If they all go ahead it could be over 2500 homes - a mix of terraced and standalone homes.
One of the earliest stories about the proposal is from 2007.
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Add to that, proposals like the one for Arlington apartments, the development at the Old Teachers’ college in Karori and countless smaller ones.
Given that our population is now expected to increase by less than 800 in five years - the question becomes who are we building for?
The council’s website still says the total number of households in Wellington City is projected to grow to approximately 93,000 by 2034 and 109,000 by 2054.
But household numbers are not the same as population.
Infometrics figures show a total of 142 new residential building consents were issued in Wellington City in 2025 compared with 120 in the same quarter of 2024. Consents increased by 43.4% from the same time the year before compared to a 9% increase across the country.
When asked who was buying all those supposed homes, Lighthouse Financial’s Michael Vincent who helps clients buying homes and investors looking for property said he had no idea.
He didn’t think it would be investors, who typically weren’t looking for new builds, and said developers may see too much risk in a large project and instead sit on their land.
Vincent said many of their Wellington customers felt stuck: they couldn’t sell homes bought near the market peak, prices had dropped off, and they now risked losing money.
“So a lot of our Wellington first time buyers are either slowing down and not buying, buying somewhere else and continuing to rent in Wellington, or just moving out of Wellington,“ he said.
The problem of land
It doesn’t help that Wellington has a land problem.
Wellington City has a shortage of accessible flat land to build on. As Dot Loves Data director Justin Lester says - Wellington is built out except for a few places, like Stebbings Valley.
In a case of good timing, international expert and former World Bank principal urban planner Alain Bertaud is in New Zealand as a guest of the New Zealand Initiative. He’s a fan of the newly reopened Wellington City Library’s design - and of New Zealand cities in general.
Bertaud was quick to mention the beauty of the area, but he’s not blind to Wellington’s issues, like its topography which means “you have very little land”.
And he said what land we did have had to be used carefully.
Someone asked him recently what made up the core of a city?
“So the core is not the number of jobs, it’s amenities, museums, the library, cafes, also, you know, good restaurants. So it's something which attracts people, and that's the concept.”
Bertaud said that led to a trade-off.
“You may want a bit of land for your home, and so you are trading off the commute into town … so you want the amenities that you need. “
The possible developments in the northern suburbs are a good example of what he means - you get a new home, you get some green space - but you also have to commute into town if that’s where you work.
He described Wellington as a linear city where we are trapped into the area and had to be all the more careful about its use.
Car parks and gardens
It’s also about how we want to live. If the apartment market in Wellington is anything to go by, many of us don’t want to live like that.
LJ Hooker’s Head of Research, Mathew Tiller, confirmed it. We want green spaces - gardens and lawns and we want car parks.
Two thirds of us don’t want to buy somewhere without a garden and 93% of households have at least one car.
Tiller said despite that, many new medium-density developments provided one or even no off-street car parks per dwelling.
“There’s a significant mismatch between household behaviour and development design,” Tiller said. “We continue to approve homes without sufficient off-street parking, even though most households own multiple vehicles.”
It’s turning streets into parking lots.
Wellington’s housing market is barely recovering. Most statistics still show values going down with first home buyers still making up the bulk of the market. Average home values have fallen between 25-30% since the market peak in 2021 - and the outlying cities are not much better.
The market is flattening out - but there’s no boom in the near future, according to real estate experts.
We need a rethink
Wharangi/Onslow-Western councillor Diane Calvert said the council needed to rescope its future plan and deal with some realities.
“I think we put too much energy into long-term planning without solving the problems,” she said.
Developers wanted to meet the demand for townhouses, with smaller gardens but were being pushed into bigger and taller buildings with no carparking.
But they could not ignore that things had changed over the past few years and the population issue was part of it, Calvert said.
More properties means potentially more rates. Wellington City Council calculates your rates based on a combination of your property's capital value, its land use, and the specific targeted services it receives.
The council uses an independent three-yearly valuation to determine each 'share' of the city's total budget, meaning if the property value increases more than the city average, rates may rise even if the council's overall budget stays the same.
Commercial properties are charged at a higher rate and the council also adds targeted rates for services like water or the recent sludge minimisation levy.
But, as Calvert says, new developments need infrastructure which cost the council.
And as Bertaud says we might be willing to trade off the commute into town for land, but we need things like water, sewage, lighting, power and public transport.
Public transport is a cursed subject here. The Post reported that there were now 31,000 fewer people coming into the city daily as we work from home more, something that has become a permanent change to our society.
So far we haven’t talked about social housing - the availability of homes for low income families.
Late last year there were under 400 on the Ministry of Social Development’s waitlist in Wellington City which has two primary providers, Kāinga Ora and Te Toi Mahana which is the council’s housing provider.
The council owns approximately 1900 social housing units with plans to bring 825 up to modern standards by 2034.
Last week Te Toi Mahana announced that in partnership with Homestead, it will deliver 23 new affordable homes at Crofton Downs. These will be the first on Te Toi Mahana’s journey towards building 500 new homes over the next 10 years.
Wellington Central MP and Green housing spokesperson Tamatha Paul is a big fan of building up rather than building out. Not the least because the infrastructure already exists.
And she said you should plan for the city you want regardless of population projections.
Paul said Wellington needed high-quality, accessible, warm, dry homes with an eye to an ageing population.
“Opponents for densification need to recognise that the tide has turned and that there is now cross-party consensus that this needs to happen,” she said.
But she said Wellington also needed to get its infrastructure sorted out.
In the next part of Capital Crossroads we look at Wellington’s business and infrastructure dilemma - and what do we need to do to improve it.