Housing
Twelve hours in the Boardrooms ended with a small defeat for adding more houses to the criteria for special character areas
Auckland councilors’ narrow vote against extending the criteria for a house to be categorized as special character will now go before independent commissioners.
A motion to include houses with four special characteristics (rather than ensuring that they meet 5 to 6 of them) in the mix when weighing or giving neighborhoods special protection was passed late Thursday by 11 votes to 10 shot down, with one councilor abstaining.
It was a decision after 12 hours of deliberation, with accusations of politics and waste of time flying through the room.
Special character areas – the zoning consultation that will prevent rezoning for greater intensification as soon as new central government-ordained rules come into force in August – have become one of the crucial battles in the war for Auckland’s future.
Councilors have largely fallen into two groups, with ideologies not opposed by their nature – a sense of history and aesthetics versus fairness, affordability and climate action.
Councilman Pippa Coom said it’s not a binary issue, saying “It’s not special character areas or affordable housing, it’s not climate action or special character, it’s not equality or special character – I think we can address all of these and more “.
“We have enabled and maintained entire communities in centrally located areas to function as gated communities without the gate.”
Waitakere Councilman Shane Henderson
However, the rhetoric of most of her fellow members tended to fall fairly clearly to one side or another of the debate, with little appetite for the space in the middle.
Board members like Wayne Walker and John Watson were eager in their desire to stop the removal of protection for character areas like Devonport, Northcote and Birkenhead.
“We’ve been on this earth for a limited time, there are not too many occasions where we have the opportunity to make a decision for Auckland’s long-term legacy going forward,” Walker said. “The modernist stuff, it will be gone in the future. It will be bowled. But the heritage will remain, as it does in so many places across the planet, and is so loved. ”
Many councilors on the pro-special character side pointed to the Peter Siddell painting on the wall of the council chambers, depicting a group of Victorian villas with the maunga of the Devonport Peninsula in the background.
The artwork has become a symbol of keeping old Auckland completely intact, with several councilors and local council chairmen saying that special character areas create a “buffer zone” around important cultural and ecological sites such as maunga.
Councilwoman Christine Fletcher said the painting hung in the office of former mayor Dame Catherine Tizard, who told her to look at it as a reminder of why they are doing the work.
Fletcher said the destruction of Auckland’s beauty “happens on our watch”.
“Auckland is a beautiful city,” she said. “We must apologize for preserving the beauty of Auckland.”
Meanwhile, councilors who want to see less protection for these areas to allow more intensified development in suburbs in the city center have said it is a matter of leaving people back in the housing market and the council to put its money where its mouth is. in terms of emission reductions. …
Shane Henderson, councilor for Waitakere, was strongly in favor of allowing more development, saying “We have enabled and maintained entire communities in centrally located areas without fencing communities”.
He said most of the intensified development and housing construction was in areas such as Western Auckland, where working-class families often live long distances from their places of work or education, and begged the suburbs in the city center to “do your part”.
Waitakere co-councilor Linda Cooper said the whole thing was like a “ground hog day” of discussions around the Auckland Unity Plan, the rulebook being added by the government’s national urban development policy.
She said adding less opportunity for density is not a defensible position.
“People say they want a compact urban form, but when it comes to the difficult decisions, they say ‘Oh no, I want to vote for my area’,” she said. “We are regional councilors – you have to vote for the regional view.”
Cooper also wondered about the lack of reflection on the colonial history of the city and the ‘special character’ lost after European arrival.
“The people living in nourakei are now forgetting that the heritage of the people who lived there has been snatched away and no one has thought anything about it,” she said. “They drove them out and took away their whare and their father. We say it’s heritage, but it’s quite young heritage.
Cooper repeated an earlier speech by Tau Henare, a member of the Independent Māori Statutory Council, who wondered why he had not heard the words Māori or tangata whenua all day.
“Just imagine what your ancestors did in 1840 and looked over this beautiful city and what a special character it was at the time,” he said.
Outside of walkable catchment areas near fast transportation, special character protection will be given to areas where 66 percent of properties have five or six special character traits.
The amendment to this that was voted on would have resulted in homes achieving a four that was included in the category to get protection.
Councilman Desley Simpson said adding the four-point houses to the criteria would be “the best compromised outcome” that could actually be put into legislation once the issue goes to the independent hearing panel.
“There are those in Wellington who order us to remove all development restrictions and there is a risk here that we are not going far enough to remove those restrictions,” she said. “If we do not comply with what the legislation requires, we lose control of the process and we may lose more than we can hold on to.”
The independent panel will look at the council’s proposed amendments to the legislation in August following public notice.