An Opinion

 

Risk is OK, if it is managed risk. Unmanaged risk is a disaster waiting to happen.
Certainty is also OK, if it is managed certainty. Unmanaged certainty is also a disaster waiting to happen.
I am not quite sure which mix of risk and certainty the Unitary Plan contains.

That was a quote in response to Stuff’s: “Auckland’s Unitary Plan bold but risky” opinion piece this morning.

The opinion piece was actually balanced and looked both sides of the debate on the Unitary Plan – noting that it was an opinion piece. The difference between this Stuff opinion piece and the “Dialogue” piece the Herald dropped on the Unitary Plan (Herald Passing Lobbying Material Again? (covered in my post there)) was the Stuff piece looked at both sides of the debate while the Herald copy and pasted an unbalanced NIMBY lobby piece in which the points have been debunked before.

 

The some extracts from the Stuff opinion piece:

OPINION: In the for-and-against debate surrounding compact cities and their impact on housing affordability, Auckland and its Unitary Plan stand out as an oddity.

The compact city term lacks a clear definition, but if you look for commonalities across the literature and practical examples of this urban form, two policy outcomes repeat themselves: urban growth restrictions and higher population densities.

…

The city’s planners argue they are in fact deregulating Auckland’s property market by easing the height restrictions that are in place in many neighbourhoods, and even then, only along transport corridors, not entire suburbs.

That should allow developers more flexibility in the type of housing they provide to the market (presumably apartments and terraced housing), satisfying the pent-up demand held by people who want to live in more compact forms but have been prevented from doing so by these rules.

Secondly, Auckland’s long standing metropolitan urban limit (MUL), which has constrained the expansion of the outer city suburbs for decades, is set to be replaced with a rural urban boundary (RUB). This new demarcation includes a vast tranche of new land big enough to accommodate 90,000 homes that will be released for development progressively until 2040.

Seen from a particular perspective, the combination could be described as a political masterstroke, taking a key policy plank from camps on either side of the compact city argument, potentially silencing critics in both.

The question remains: will this strategy address housing affordability issues within the city?

While readers might prefer a forthright answer, a more candid assessment of the question is that it is too early to tell, and execution will play a critical role. But what is certain is that there are risks aplenty

…

If the Auckland Council is committed to this path, then it needs some pointed strategies to address and mitigate the potential impact of these risks. Changes to urban form are expensive, and often irreversible. The problems we create today are the ones we have to live with tomorrow.

Perhaps a better place to start is by demonstrating to the citizens of the city (and indeed New Zealand as a whole) that this approach is the best way forward versus all the other alternatives, a task that many opponents of the Unitary Plan feel has yet to be completed.

——-

 

Demonstration and Execution of the Unitary Plan – the big question in itself. How can the Unitary Plan be demonstrated to be best practice for Auckland. How can the Unitary Plan be executed with success rather than absolute disaster and failure. This is where the managed risk or unmitigated disaster comes into play?

So how much of the Unitary Plan will be down to managed risk and how much down to an unmitigated disaster?

I will post my musings on this tomorrow.

 

A final comment:

Managing risk is crucial – but we’ve seen all the past failures eg Bus 4 inappropriate development. The starting problem was that planners just went to the “smart” growth end game, without research, and every time people did that research eg the “real development potential” it was just ignored. 
No city is like Auckland, from a very minor CBD with limited growth, to education component, to industrial mix, to isthmus locked geography, yet we want to follow single purpose, river based European cities developed before the automobile…..
And then they do it with no staging to monitor/manage the risk.