On Thursday afternoon I will be attending a closed Mediation session of the Unitary Plan covering “Unitary Plan Chapter/Section H1.2.3 & H1.2.6 – Number of parking and loading spaces.” In other words Parking Minimums and Maximums for the Residential, and Business Zones of the Unitary Plan.
In short submitters to the Unitary Plan on the above topics will sit down informally and talk about where we would like Parking Minimum and Maximum ratios for an urban development depending on what zone it sits on. For me it is a case of agreeing with the Parking Maximums in the City Centre Zone and the Metropolitan Centre Zone, but tightening up the Parking Minimums in the Residential Zones. By tightening I mean lowering the Parking Minimums in the following zones: Terrace Housing and Apartment, Mixed Housing Urban, and Mixed Housing Suburban.
Why?
Two main reasons:
Help Auckland achieve its goal of The World’s Most Liveable City
Lessening restrictive development controls on new developments thus in the long run lowering the end cost to consumers. In other words helping restore affordability and more to the point accessibility
Once Mediation is complete then we go to the dedicated Hearings which for early to mid July (and these are open to the public).
Below is some material around the price of Parking Minimums.
Every time a new building includes space for cars, it passes those costs on to tenants.
Seattle’s smart new plan to give tenants transit passes instead of parking spaces should help housing stay more affordable down the line. To get a sense just how much money renters might save, the city relied on a 2012 study of how parking impacts affordability from its neighbor in the Pacific Northwest, Portland. That work is striking for both its clarity and its conclusions, so let’s took a closer look.
Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability modeled what happens to unit prices when a building developer decides to include parking. A few specs if you’re into that sort of thing: the sites were 10,000 square feet (so, about 4 stories tall), zoned for mixed-use (so, shops on the ground floor), with units averaging 550 square feet (so, depending on your persona, cozy or cramped).
Charting the data on cost, we can see rents climb as the parking options become more complex, and thus expensive for the developer. A low-end rent in a building with no parking comes to $800 a month. Rent in the same unit in a building with the cheapest parking option, surface spots, comes to $1,200—a 50 percent jump. In a building with underground parking, the low-end rent hits $1300, a spike of 62.5 percent.
Talking Southern Auckland 