Remind me not to have a whine about Auckland’s planning after taking a look at Melbourne.
Artist’s impressions of new developments may look great, but there’s no guarantee they will ever become reality.
A new residential development usually looks great on paper. The master plan will show schools, childcare facilities, a town centre, community and leisure facilities and new road connections, all prefixed by the words ”proposed”, ”planned” or ”future”.
But when considering a new estate, buyers need to know that some of those amenities can take years to build, and others might never eventuate.
Now before going on, I suggest you open another tab in your browser and bring up Google Maps. With Google Maps open, type in the Search Box: Bridge Inn Road, Doreen, Victoria, Australia – and allow the program to take you there. Keep it open as it is there in the suburb of Doreen where the The Age article focuses on.
For those who want in-depth analysis on Melbourne and wider Victoria’s housing woes I recommend going to the Macro Business Super Blog site and reading articles from author Unconventional Economist – Leith van Onselen who I have refered to here a number of times in reference to Auckland Planning.
What is happening in Doreen (with the residential vs infrastructure development gap) is what can happen to Auckland when the city finally begins those 400,000 new residential dwellings over the next thirty years. Now while Melbourne has a housing over-supply and Auckland a housing shortage, the planning principles and their failings are pretty much the same.
In an ideal world, developers, councils and the state government would work together to fund the timely provision of essential infrastructure. But the needs of a growing population can go unmet for years, resulting in a significantly poorer living experience than anticipated.
Same applies (including the consequences) here as well and this will usually apply (translated of course):
Fast, regular and reliable public transport is notably absent from most of Melbourne’s outer suburbs. This leaves residents no choice but to drive to work, schools, shops and medical facilities, and the resulting congestion and air pollution affect us all.
Although our public transport in Auckland is much to be desired as a whole any-way.
The Mernda-Doreen growth corridor in Melbourne’s outer north typifies the way in which infrastructure can fail to keep pace with population growth. There were fewer than 2000 homes here in 2007; there are now close to 7000 and it’s projected that there will be more than 15,000 by 2019.
Yet the much-spruiked Mernda Town Centre is yet to materialise, there’s no state secondary school, public transport is minimal and road congestion is already chronic.
Hmm, I took a look on Google Maps at Mernda and if I was to take the absolute dead-centre of that place the town centre is a tin-pot roundabout, a pub and some stock-yards. Good lord what happened there in Mernda folks. As for the town centre not eventuating and associated facilities (or simply taking forever) I take a look at The Palms in Papamoa, and Addison in Takanini (just down the road from where I live in Papakura). With The Palms, the golf course was never built and only now some (however many years since what 1995?) time later the town centre is at least 3/4 finished (after being 1/4 done for that period of time). The Palms was the first sub-division I watched with fascination as a kid as this now mature residential sub-division grew and grew and going back down some near 20 years later I could write some interesting tales on it. As for Addison, that was meant to be a master planned community with Town Centre and old folks home. Well around 1/3 of the residential area is built with only a recent surge since New Year under-way again on the next bout of residential building. However there is no town centre or retirement village and won’t be for a while with the initial developer going bust due to the Financial Crisis. Now the main road is future-proofed for when the Town Centre is built, and with a bit of luck Walters Road will be upgraded and get a nice new Park and Ride Station by 2017/8 (could even be a junction if my wish of moving Port of Auckland to South East Auckland happens. 
However both cases serve a remind on the time it takes from turning the first sod of dirt to full completion to that community you saw in the fancy glossy real estate flyer (that is if everything is built).
Mr Krygger says there are bus services to University Hill and Greensborough but they’re probably too slow and infrequent to be widely used. He had hoped that the recent extension of the Epping train line would be continued to Mernda.
Unfortunately, the planned start date for the extension is 2020 or 2027 (depending on which government is in power) and there’s a similar lack of urgency about much-needed rail links in suburbs such as Epping North and Caroline Springs.
Now where does this sound familiar? Oh look Auckland and its public transport system. The City Rail Link, Bus-ways, The Airport Rail Line, The North Shore Rail Line, The Botany Rail Line; apart from the CRL there seems to be a lack of urgency here in Auckland too with rolling out new p/t infrastructure. As with the CRL, well that is a hot topic amongst some people from all with some start dates being touted around in conversations at the moment. I am having an email conversation with Matt L from Auckland Transport Blog over this particular issue – especially the City Rail Link (CRL); whether to delay start it, just build the tunnel and Aotea Station, build the entire thing now at warp speed and just of now platforms at Aotea Square. Being mindful of urban and transport planning/development in Auckland, I keep myself abreast with what is going on in those fields (blogs, media, meetings, Council workings, discussions) and will often write my thoughts and opinions here at VOAKL to share and discuss. Always have loved urban and transport planning/development and is most likely why I am a keen Sim City and Trainz 12 player. An interest and passion one would call it.
Council officers are often as frustrated as the ratepayers by the lag time between residential development and the provision of essential facilities. Kelvin Walsh, director of City Sustainability at Hume City, another growth-corridor council, is acutely aware of the challenges involved in creating sustainable new communities.
”The responsibility to deliver infrastructure rests with so many people – not just with local government but with the developers themselves and the state government,” Mr Walsh says.
”The greatest challenge we have is understanding when a development occurs. We focus on residential development, but in a broader sense we’re building a whole community rather than just delivering housing.
That frustration would also be shared by ratepayers, businesses and other concerned citizens – especially when we do not get this fluid cooperation with developers, local and central government here in NZ on urban and basically (or rather ultimately) community development.
”Often new areas are developed separately from existing areas, and there’s more reliance on those new suburbs being self-contained. When you grow a city, logically you’d build on existing areas, gradually growing out.”
Err planning failure that we should be mindful of here in Auckland?
“If you had greater control of urban sequencing, that was somehow tied to provision of infrastructure – involving all levels of government and the private sector – we would end up with a much more sustainable urban form that would better meet the needs of the new community …
”We tend to think about hard infrastructure, but these communities also need a whole lot of services that are more about community, health and cultural development. So it’s critically important for us to understand how best to manage the relationship between existing and new areas in growing municipalities.”
“Council advocates enormously for the services and facilities required. It’s up to the state government to provide them in a timely way.”
And that is where the crux is: control of urban sequencing do that urban and infrastructure development happen in tandem – growing and adapting to each others needs and the wider surrounding environment. Not build the urban development first then worry about the infrastructure later – that is how you get cases like Doreen, Victoria and in Auckland historically and currently (which we pay the price for). I have written about this development in sequence as has authors in Transport Blog in their various posts. I personally believe in a fully integrated yet sequential urban and transport development both in Brown and Greenfield sites. I have an alternative idea to how to achieve this through Municipal Utility Districts, but full research is going need to be done first before it gets introduced and implemented in Auckland.
“Council advocates enormously for the services and facilities required. It’s up to the state government to provide them in a timely way.”
No need to comment there – as I am sure you people have your own thoughts and reactions there to here in Auckland and New Zealand
Gerard Coutts is a planner and property strategist who feels most new suburbs fall far short of the ideal of sustainable urban development. He believes sound planning is hindered where land on the city fringe is developed in a piecemeal way, which he describes as ”catastrophic”.
”The problem is dealing with fragmented land ownerships,” Mr Coutts says.
”There’s a failure of the development industry at the lower end of the scale. A landowner sells a block of land to a small developer who will stick in 20 houses, exploiting the land to make a profit – which is fair enough – but the consequence is lack of amenity.”
“If you’re developing five acres [two hectares] here and there, there’s no capacity to create a master-planned solution. No one takes responsibility for a planning structure over large areas of land. Then five or 10 years after the project is finished, who evaluates whether things work?”
Mr Coutts believes the solution to poorly planned sprawl is for smaller owners to pool their land into large tracts in a model he describes as ”land aggregation”. These larger greenfield sites then form viable locations for the creation of sustainable communities.
”You achieve amenity by reducing fragmentation on the city’s edge, working with groups of landowners to achieve land aggregation,” he says. ”It depends on the commitment from the developer, but we also need government, developers and communities working in concert to achieve harmony in the planning process.”
“Only a few larger developers have the capacity to invest in the required infrastructure.
Now there is a word of warning here as Auckland gets ready to build over 400,000 new residential dwellings, plus employment centres, and civic centres (schools, libraries, community centres, etc..). We can not do our urban development in such a piecemeal manner as Melbourne has – as that will cost us as it has again in Melbourne. We need economies of scale that are afforded with large whole-scale urban development here (and yes even that needs to be done right with our Planners, Council and Developers) to keep affordability realistic for our citizens and ratepayers. Municipal Utility Districts if they were to be used here in Auckland only work with large-scale urban development projects, again due to economies of scale of such whole-scale large developments (Brown and Greenfield). So a very careful look is needed on the scale of urban development needed for Auckland, and whether we can get economies of scale in larger such developments for the city (Auckland).
“Melbourne’s getting so tangled: houses are plonked in disconnected communities and with the density of traffic, we have congestion every day of the week, 18 hours a day.”
Do your research – if you’re considering buying or building in a new area, speak with home owners already in residence, and contact residents’ groups for information on the progress of the development. It’s also worth visiting completed estates built by the same developer to check out the quality of amenities.
You may also want to contact government authorities responsible for education and transport.
The lesson to be learnt, the situation to avoid here in Auckland when we start our urban development projects per The Auckland and Unitary Plans. A warning also to prospective residents as well, I would say a few got “burnt” with The Palms and Addison not coming to full fruition as in the glossy real estate brochure.
So lets learn from our historical mistakes and Melbourne’s present mistakes with urban and transport development. Lets get our urban development right and make Auckland a truly liveable AND affordable city for all.
VOAKL and My Submission to the ideal Auckland Plan:
The Auckland Plan should have One Goal: To accommodate employment and economic activity in supporting a healthy social and physical environment for over two million residents by 2040. In doing so The Plan has to follow the objective of being: Simple, Efficient, Thrifty, and restoring Affordability to residents and businesses while still making Auckland ‘The Most Liveable City.’
) on The 
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