Chris Bishop sets out radical land use and planning reforms

Thursday, 4 July 2024

Housing Minister Chris Bishop is set to double down on his war on house prices with a swathe of liberalising zoning and land reforms, to free up land markets and developers to deliver high and low density housing and commercial developments.

In a copy of a speech Bishop gave to the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand this morning, seen by The Post, Bishop will set house zoning targets for councils; scrap urban-rural limits; encourage mixed use zoning; and get rid of minimum floor sizes and balcony requirements for apartments, while Government will much more tightly define high density transport corridors eligible for development.

“Limits on urban growth lower productivity by locking workers and businesses out of cities where they would be more productive,” Bishop said.

The radical reforms, which Bishop justifies on the grounds that expensive houses are “fundamentally an issue of intergenerational equity”, says that the economics of development, not planning rules, should guide what is built where, in a blueprint for high density city growth up and urban growth outwards.

There are six key measures. The 24 so-called tier 1 and tier 2 councils around the country — mostly the bigger ones — will have to meet new “housing growth targets”. These targets will require affected councils to zone 30 years worth of land for “live-zoning”. Currently councils need to “plan for 30 years”, but only live zone for three years.

“We will be changing the requirements to make councils live-zone thirty years of development capacity and make it available right now. In effect, this will flood the market with opportunities for development, and over time, drive down land prices and the cost of housing.”

The Bishop plan will also prohibit councils from setting hard rural-urban land limits, while the Government works on a “right to build” at city fringes provided development costs are covered.

“Councils would not be able to turn down a development on the grounds that perceived demand isn’t there, or that the infrastructure costs are too high,” Bishop said this morning.

The plan will also see the Government specify density requirements around transport corridors. Council will set the corridors, subject to central Government criteria.

“We will simplify the definition of rapid transit, to address alleged ambiguity in the current definition. The interminable and frankly boring debate in Wellington over whether the Johnsonville train line was “rapid transit” was time-consuming, expensive and frustrating.

“We will probably simply list the metropolitan train lines and busways that trigger upzoning (while future-proofing for new lines and busways that are developed).”

There are other significant changes flagged in the speech.

Minimum floor sizes and balcony requirements for high-density housing are going to be ditched.

“This will increase housing supply by enabling more homes to be built at a cheaper price point and most importantly reduce the demand for inferior informal accommodation.”

Bishop said that he often hears grizzles about potential “shoebox apartments”, but the speech delivers the riposte, “Do you know what is smaller than a shoebox apartment? A car or an emergency housing motel room.”

New rules for mixed-used development are also going to be a part of the mix, with a direction being issued to the big tier 1 and tier 2 councils setting up a “baseline level of mixed use across their areas”.

“This might include, for example, allowing small-scale activities such as dairies and cafes to operate anywhere within urban areas, or activities of a greater scale if communities wish for this to occur,” Bishop said.

At the centre of this is Bishop’s view, outlined in the speech, that developing cities in line with how people want to live and the economic activity they undertake is a guiding principle.

“Our cities need to look and grow the way that people actually want to live, and not the way a tidy-minded planner in a council cubical think people should live.”

The speech also confirmed that the “medium density residential standards”, controversial rules which were created by a Labour-National deal in 2021 under former leader Judith Collins, will be made optional for councils. This had been well flagged since before the 2023 election campaign.