According to the Herald, Bill English is of the view that high house prices are caused by planning requirements for landscaping of sites and balconies large enough to accommodate a table and chairs. Here is how the Herald put it:
The high cost of housing "hanging over" young families is a result of the efforts to protect the environment in Auckland and other big cities, Prime Minister Bill English says.
Regulations dictating how furniture should be laid out in yet-to-be-built buildings and how plants should be positioned on sections needed to be axed, the Prime Minister said today.
See: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11807509
No, I think he is trying to use the landscape and balcony examples as easy to grasp examples of how the planning system has gone too far in trying to protect the environment, at the expense of housing capacity and supply (however by trying to make things simple, it also kind of makes them a bit absurd, but let’s put that aside, as we know there is a grain of truth in the argument especially when it comes to ‘going up’).
A bit more pointedly, he reportedly also made the following comment:
English said local councils in Auckland had spent "many decades" trying to stop the city growing, and as a result the planning system couldn't cope with recent growth.
Maybe this is where the environment does come into play, with the common view being that efforts to protect the natural environment have stopped (or at least slowed) the outward growth of the city while measures to protect the built environment have slowed the upwards growth of the city, with both to the detriment of housing supply and capacity.
But what if it is the other way around? Have planned efforts to expand Auckland either up or out been slowed by the environment? Lets look at this 'alternative fact'.
Previously he has said that cities need to plan for growth, whether that be up or out - he doesn’t mind which; it is more about getting on and doing one or the other, rather than talking about one or the other. Broadly this is the gist of the urban development capacity policy statement. The lack of preference between up or out belies some serious concerns about the miss understanding of the long term costs of one compared to the other.
Usually this call to do something is followed up by a statement that as going up (intensification) is too hard, the only option is to go out. But that is usually where the analysis stops.
The idea that a city like Auckland can easily accommodate growth by continual outward expansion, just as it did in the 50s to 80s before the urban fence got erected, thereby solving its housing problems, starts to call into question people’s ability to grasp a few simple facts about urban growth. So do does simple comparisons between Christchurch and Auckland and other cities.
The post war urban expansion of Auckland that delivered housing for all (well, perhaps most people) was heavily dependent upon the massive public investment on the motorway system that preceded the expansion and fed that expansion, as well as heavy investment in public housing pre and post war. Without the investment in transport, the city would not have spread so far. It was really infrastructure that drove the process, in particular the much faster travel times enabled by the motorway system, and hence the greater opportunity for people to travel larger distances within a normal commute time. This really opened up the urban frontier. The investment in public housing helped address housing affordability issues. It was quite a winning combination.
The point is, it is the commuting time that sets the city limit, and the city’s density adjusts to fit its population within this limit. A rule of thumb is the 30 minute commute in the morning and the 30 minute commute in the evening. This is what most people feel comfortable with. This is the Marchetti constant. It is the average time spent by a person commuting each day, which is approximately one hour, and according to Marchetti, this amount of time has been evident across the centuries. What is the average weekly time spent commuting in Auckland in 2015 per worker? 5 hours.
See: https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/psych/about/our-research/nzavs/Feedback%20Reports/NZAVS-Policy-Brief-Regional-Commute-Times.pdf
Pre trams, when most people walked, cities tended to be about 2.5 to 3kms in radius. Draw a 3km radius circle around the foot of Queen Street and you get not a bad approximation of the spread of colonial Auckland. Come the trams, and average travel times may have leapt from 5km an hour to, say, 20km per hour. Draw a 10km circle and you get the outer limits of Auckland circa 1930s. The density of the city adjusted to fit its population into this circle. Post war and another leap in average speeds with the motorway - say 60km per hour on average. A 30km radius circle takes you out to Orewa in the north and down to Papakura in the south. The density of the city relaxed to fill in the space available.
Since the heyday of the early1980s, average travel times have decreased as congestion has increased, and so urban expansion has slowed somewhat and infilling of existing suburbs got going in earnest. But there are always gaps and edges to be filled in, and smaller extensions as minor upgrades are completed to the motorway network, so it was never a complete stop to outwards expansion, more a slow down.
Auckland’s isthmus form tends to exacerbate the travel time equation, as expansion tends to get pushed into a few key corridors, elongating urban form and with it travel times. If Auckland was on a featureless plain, then a bit of extra land around all of the edge would add up to quite a bit of land. Thus geography and limited investment in new transport infrastructure through the 1980s and 1990s slowed urban expansion, with planning tools like the MUL playing a supporting, but not determinative role.
Looking ahead to an Auckland of 2 million people, it is hard to see any transport investment in the future which is going to substantially increase travel speeds from the centre to the edge, and hence drive further expansion. Fast, dedicated PT out to the edges would be the next step, but we are talking about really fast travel times, way ahead of the current rail and bus way system. If anything the transport programme proposed for the future urban growth areas recently identified is more about trying to see current travel times not increase too much, rather than see them improve dramatically.
No real step change in transport accessibility suggests to me that the future urban growth areas identified in the Unitary Plan will only grow incrementally, due to the travel time penalty involved, unless the government gets really bold with some form of ultra fast PT on new dedicated routes. No sign of that on the horizon.
Some decentralisation of employment into hubs to the north, west and south of the the city (Albany, Manukau) will help a bit to moderate commute times for some, but these employment areas are never going to be as big as the centre. In any case it is very rare these days for households to have all members working in the same general location.
As for the recent experience of Christchurch where the urban limits were relaxed, houses were built quickly and house prices stabilised, my impression is that urban expansion still works as an option, just, as the 30 minute limit has not yet been reached. Rolleston, Lincoln, Kaiapoi and other areas seeing lots of growth are just on the 30km type radius, helped by the centre of gravity for employment shifting west post the earthquake. However saying that because a bit of the urban expansion medicine quickly worked in Christchurch to cure its post earthquake housing illness, so it should work in Auckland, tends to ignore the scale differences, as well as geography.
So is it really the planner’s urban limit that will constrain Auckland’s outward expansion? Perhaps in a few pinch points, but I get the feeling it will be our geography (environment) and limited investment in transport infrastructure that will be the restraint. That is, provided people have other options to live within a decent commute. If they don’t, and the only option is out to the urban frontier, then it is bound to get messy.
On that point, the question for Auckland is how the density profile of the city will have to change to fit in the population growth expected within the limit set by its transport system and geography.
The transport changes over the decades have also changed the land value profile of the city, as it is the changes in transport accessibility that have driven land values and hence house prices, rather than zoning, urban limits or similar. Urban limits, zoning and demand do make a difference, but it is more about accentuating a trend, rather than the fundamental driver. In other words, take off all zoning controls, and I don’t think land values would fall by a great amount in Auckland.
I don’t have any data on this, and I would like to find some, but I wouldn’t be surprised that the story of the city’s land values went something like this:
- For the 6km /20km wide city, land values would have fallen steeply from centre to edge, such as:
- For the post war, motorway city, the land value gradient was almost inverted. Ponsonby used to be one of the cheapest suburbs, the more expensive suburbs further out. I’ve drawn the value gradient as follows.
- Over the past few decades as the motorway system has clogged up, and the Marchetti constant has taken a stronger hold on more and more people, then there has been a structural shift back to higher values in the centre, with some bumps out towards the edge around sub regional centres.
Over the next 20 years, I can only see they 2000s gradient getting steeper towards the centre, and fatter in the middle. I can’t see much extension further out. Maybe the Western Ring Route will push out the commuter belt a bit in the west, but getting from the edge to the centre can only get worse.
This new land value profile that has emerged over the last decade or two has to be reflected in land use planning, but that then leads onto a whole bunch of issues about density and design, including the size of balconies and landscape requirements, as well the environment we have already built on and around, including volcanic cones, highly valued coastlines and heritage suburbs. So no matter which way we turn, we still bump up against the environment. More on that soon.
