So is my left hand talking to my right hand here folks?

After the rather vexed Hobsonville Marine Industry Precinct debate in the Auckland Development Committee came the Special Housing Area debate which while shorter, it was just as vexed.

In short the Housing Project Office is beginning the motions to establish the fourth tranche of Special Housing Areas with three tranches already under-way.

From The Auckland Development Committee Agenda – Page 7 – Housing Monitoring Report – Executive Summary

Housing Monitoring Report

Purpose
1. The purpose of this report is:
 To provide the committee with a copy of the Auckland Housing Accord Monitoring Report #2 (October 2013 – March 2014); and
 Enable the committee to receive a presentation on the process for determining the 4th tranche of special housing areas (SHAs).

Executive summary
2. The Auckland Housing Accord requires the targets for new dwellings and new sites consented to be monitored and reported to the Joint Housing Steering Group. The Joint Housing Steering Group comprises the Minister of Housing, Hon Nick Smith; the Associate Minister of Housing, Hon Paula Bennett; Mayor Len Brown and Deputy Mayor Penny Hulse.

3. The Monitoring Report assesses progress from 1 October 2013 as this aligns to the dates in which the housing legislation became operative (16 September 2013), the Auckland Housing Accord formally signed (3 October 2013) and the Housing Project Office (HPO) opened (1 October 2013).

4. The 2nd Monitoring Report was formally received by the Joint Steering Group on Friday 30 May 2014 and publicly released by the Minister and Mayor on the afternoon of 30 May. The Accord targets take account of activity within SHAs and beyond. As expected, improved consenting numbers are the result of a general increase in activity across Auckland at this stage as it is early days for consents to be lodged within SHAs. We note that only 22 of the 63 recommended SHAs are currently operative and a number of the T1 and T2 SHAs are large greenfield, multi-owned sites that require plan variations and extensive professional input by the applicants’ consultants prior to the lodgement of a consent.

5. The Monitoring Report identifies that 18 consent applications within SHAs have been approved to date and 18 masterplanning pre-applications are underway, including more than 10 plan variations. The Masterplanning applications in greenfield areas will have a significant contribution to make on bringing land supply forward. Areas such as Hingaia, Scott Point and Kumeu-Huapai benefit from the SHA status as there is a fast-track process to change the Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan (PAUP) zoning from future urban to live residential zonings. The plan variations for such areas are anticipated to be lodged by August 2014. Under the new housing legislation these will need to be finalised within six months as opposed to what potentially could be several years under the Resource Management Act (RMA). Similarly, in the qualifying development consenting team, there are 18 preapplications also underway. This acknowledges the developers’ need to have time to plan their proposals and integrate infrastructure activity prior to the lodgement of the consent.

6. With the increase in consenting activity across Auckland, the year 1 Accord target to achieve 9,000 new residential building consents or consented sections is likely to be exceeded by almost 1,300. Nevertheless, significant effort is still required to ensure year 2 (13,000) and year 3 targets (17,000) consented dwellings and sites are achieved. A copy of the Monitoring Report is attached for the committee’s information. To date we are still only half way back to the building consent peak in 2004/5.

7. It is anticipated that there will be a 4th tranche of SHAs reported to committee by August 2014. To achieve this deadline the process is likely to include one round of meetings with local boards together with due diligence against the approved criteria. Staff would like to present the proposed process for establishing tranche 4 SHAs at the committee meeting.

After the Hobsonville Marine Industry Precinct debate you might want to throw in the concern about having enough land zoned and ready to go for job centres/employment complexes. Because apart from the City Centre I am not exactly seeing movement with our Metropolitan Centres and our industrial complexes (both existing and zoning new land for more). So the wider concern is we are going full speed with getting housing areas set up but we might be lagging with infrastructure (physical and social) being set up, and we are definitely lagging with having our employment centres ready to go as our population increases.

So the question again needing to be asked is:

Auckland is “great” at “building” residential complexes but is rather “hopeless” at building job and employment complexes (commercial and industrial (not including the main City Centre)). True of false?

Might extend that question to infrastructure as well.

For example I know the Southern (sewer) Interceptor is at capacity and is needing replacing as South Auckland grows. The capacity issue with the Southern Interceptor was used in an attempt to stall the progression of the Puhinui Gateway industrial project west of Wiri. That project would have seen rural land between State Highway 20B (to the airport), State Highway 20 and existing Wiri flipped over to either light or heavy industrial zoning.

The mayor, Len Brown, said housing would be a big part of the discussion when government & council meet next Friday. He agreed that “marrying up with existing infrastructure” was important, but didn’t venture into the issue of whether resources were being diverted

 However, he did add that “maybe it’s time to flesh out” the Government’s contribution to the region’s infrastructure.