Special housing areas in Auckland 'spectacular flop' – Labour

Friday, 6 November 2015

The Auckland Council says it is only aware of 102 houses that have been built in the city's 97 special housing areas since they were created two years ago.

Reports that only 102 houses are known to have been built in Auckland's special housing areas show the policy is a 'spectacular flop', Labour says.

Housing Minister Nick Smith has dismissed the figures as 'incomplete, misleading and selective', saying residential construction in the city is at a 10-year high.

The Government signed a housing accord with the Auckland Council in October 2013, with a target of 39,000 new sections and dwellings in the city over three years.

To achieve that, the Government created 'special housing areas' (SHAs) where consents would be fast-tracked to stimulate the market.

However, the Auckland Council revealed it is only aware of only 102 houses built under the rules, in just two of the 97 SHAs – Weymouth and northern Tamaki.

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The council's manager of housing growth and infrastructure strategy, David Clelland, told the NZ Herald it was unsure of how many houses had actually been built in the areas, as it did not have a system to tag building compliance certificates when homes were finished in an SHA.

'We need a better system for the housing project office to be informed that a home has been completed,' he said.

'We know of the [102], because our compliance officer wanted to check the number [in Weymouth and northern Tamaki]. We will have to do more of that phone calling.'

The NZ Herald reported the owners of at least two blocks of land and one commercial site in SHAs had put their properties up for sale without building houses, with one block advertised as 'a land-banking option'.

Labour housing spokesman Phil Twyford said the figures showed that the Government's housing accord had been 'a spectacular flop'.

'There are almost as many special housing areas as there are houses built in the two years that the accord has been in place - what that says is that the policy is fundamentally flawed.'

Twyford said the Government had focussed too much on consenting and failed to deal with other, more important supply issues.

A 'perverse consequence' of the rules had been greater capital gains opportunities for land-bankers and speculators, he said.

'In so many of the special housing areas, people are basically just sitting on their land and watching the value go up.'

Housing Minister Nick Smith said data on the number of homes built was 'incomplete, misleading and selective', as there were no reliable annual figures on completed houses and the accord's targets were based on consents.

Smith said a monitoring report released recently showed 19,921 residential consents had been issued as of June, about 1,000 ahead of schedule.

Smith said the pace of residential construction in Auckland was at a 10-year high, with 8,721 consents issued in the last year compared with a low of 3485 after the global financial crisis.

'This is the longest and strongest sustained growth in residential construction in Auckland's history.'

He said over 2,000 building consents had been issued for the 97 special housing areas in Auckland, out of a long-term capacity of over 45,000.

'A power of work' was required to convert land parcels into housing in the areas, including structural plans for road and piping, resource consents for earthworks and construction, and the building of infrastructure.