Remember your Industrial Complexes, and Cities that run two official and/or technical City Centres
I saw this from Generation Zero’s Sudhvir Singh before the Auckland Conversation piece earlier this week:
The graph was a series of graphs that came from Melbourne’s The Age piece on urban planning. Some extracts from the article:
Melbourne’s planning disaster: jobs boom in CBD while affordable housing grows ever outwards in suburbs
Is Melbourne broken?
There’s a growing divide in the world’s most-liveable city, City Limits co-author Paul Donegan tells 3AW Breakfast.
- Alice Osborne loves Point Cook, where she lives with her two young children and husband Jason.
Alice and Jason Osborne in Point Cook, where they live with their children William, 7, and Lucy,
She works a day or two a week at the local primary school, helping teach textiles.
But before the arrival of the couple’s second child Lucy, Ms Osborne had a highly skilled specialist role in pre-natal research, working for the Victorian health department.
The failure to properly plan Australia’s cities – a failure by local, state and federal governments – forced Osborne to make a difficult choice: a great job or her family.
She chose her family.
The Osbornes are typical of millions of Australian caught on the far side of a new urban divide: between those who live near the centre of our cities and those who live near the outer fringes.
On Monday, the Grattan Institute releases City Limits: Why Australia’s Cities are Broken and How We Can Fix Them.
The book details how cities like Melbourne have evolved over the last decade. Jobs have concentrated in city centres.
Meanwhile affordable housing, particularly for families, has boomed on the city fringes.
The trend has locked in the car as the only viable mode of getting to many jobs for Melburnians. Even then, though, extreme gridlock in suburbs like the Osborne’s means driving to work is often not an option.
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Source and full article: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/melbournes-planning-disaster-jobs-boom-in-cbd-while-affordable-housing-grows-ever-outwards-in-suburbs-20150302-13oksj.html
Unfortunately the article and its graphs contain two deep flaws:
- Did they measure accessibility to the industrial complexes of Melbourne?
- Did they measure the accessibility to both Sydney CBD and Parramatta CBD, both technical and official CBDs recognised by the New South Wales Planning Ministry?
Because if the study and subsequent article did not measure those two points above then the said article is pretty much useless to make a comparison to.
Why?
In the case of City Centres or Central Business Districts, Sydney like Auckland officially operates two city centres. For Sydney it is its main City Centre, and Parramatta CBD which is up for intense development under the New South Wales Sydney Plan. For Auckland we have the main City Centre, and the smaller Manukau City Centre in South Auckland.
Now while Auckland Council planners and the Auckland Plan are behind in comparison to Sydney in doing proper planning for the respective second City Centres, the Parramatta CBD is designed to compliment (not compete) Sydney CBD while serving a very large catchment in West Sydney itself. The purpose of this is two fold:
- Balance the employment load
- Mitigate against excessive long distance commuting from the west to Sydney Central
Thus on the second point I would like to see the travel patterns for greater Sydney to the same detail as what a Ministry of Transport commissioned report into Auckland commuting illustrated last year (link further down).
See: http://www.strategy.planning.nsw.gov.au/sydney/
As for Auckland that Ministry of Transport report showed three things which would rebut The Age article as well as the Auckland Plan (which would think we had the same problem as Melbourne):
- Yes the City Centre draws a lot of commuting traffic
- South Auckland commutes within itself mainly
- The industrial complexes in the South attracted as many commuters as the main City Centre would if not more
For more on commuting trends in Auckland especially in South Auckland check these two earlier posts:
AUCKLAND’S COMMUTING JOURNEYS – A SERIES. #MAJOR NON CITY CENTRE EMPLOYMENT CENTRES OVERVIEW
AUCKLAND’S COMMUTING JOURNEYS – A SERIES. #CONCLUDING REMARKS
In the end like Sydney Auckland has multiple large employment centres both commercial and industrial. This would “skewer” commuting analysis and interpretation seen in The Age article. And yes I can see why City Centres would be the primary focus on commuting analysis as well. Industry is not entirely sexy nor places one would want to send a tourist on a day trip. But industrial complexes are often very large employers with large commuting trends to and from them that impact on the rest of the transport network. This must be remembered when undertaking both planning and job accessibility study exercises. South Auckland alone illustrates that.
Now this piece from Bob Dey would essentially debunk Sudhvir’s assertion as well as why we should not be comparing ourselves to Melbourne for employment accessibility analysis. For that matter Auckland Council should read Bob’s piece as well.
From the Property Report:
Economic report for council an exhortation to relax land use rules
A line in Wednesday’s agenda for the monthly meeting of Auckland Council’s regional strategy & policy committee refers to an information item, technical publications from the council’s research & evaluation unit produced over the last 8 months, but you will find the latest publication only by chance.The research unit highlights 2 reports, Auckland’s housing market: spatial trends in dwelling prices and affordability for first home buyers, published last September, and the 2014 State of Auckland report cards. The one that’s missing, with a publication date of 13 February, is Moving on up: Relaxing land use restrictions can lift Auckland city, a discussion paper prepared at NZIER (the Institute of Economic Research) by Dr Kirdan Lees and quality assured by the institute’s principal economist, Shamubeel Eaqub.
It’s an exhortation to build beyond a number of the limits imposed by councillors when they finalised the proposed unitary plan for consultation last September. But, like a report by Motu Research which Building, Housing & Environment Minister Nick Smith hailed in January, it’s a low-rent attempt at swaying people with what can not be called research.
The Motu paper’s authors said it was the view of developers and therefore lacked balance, and they were true to their word. It was unbalanced. The NZIER paper has a headline which isn’t substantiated anywhere in the report’s 25 pages.
According to the executive summary, “We use a simple, calibrated, monocentric spatial model (the Alonso‐Muth‐Mills model) that does not account for the benefits of land use regulations such as improvements in amenity values associated with the city. We estimate that the collective suite of land use regulations, that apply to height, density & other land uses, currently costs families about $933 every year. Removing these rules reduces travel times and lowers the cost of housing.”
This is perhaps the most explanatory sentence in NZIER’s discussion paper for Auckland Council: “Even polycentric models would give but we need to be clear – we are approximating a rich reality – that includes polycentric centres of activity – with a simple model.”
You could describe that as congested nonsense. I’ve picked on a sentence which is missing at least one word and, with 3 dashes, gives options on how to connect the pieces.
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Geography & topography certainly make Auckland an unusual city, one that doesn’t easily fit the model best applied to landscapes that stretch forever, as around Australian cities and much of the US. As far as I can see from this attempt, the best advice would have been to abandon that model and try some other gauge.
One that might have been much easier to use, and would have produced more useable results, would have been to take a selection of suburbs – fringe, middling & distant. For example, Remuera, Epsom, Mt Eden, Mt Roskill, Herne Bay, New Lynn, Massey, Takapuna, Glenfield, Browns Bay, the Hibiscus Coast, Warkworth, Papakura, Hingaia, Pukekohe.
…….
Auckland has at least 50 centres with retail activity of some substance, a number of commercial districts and several large industrial suburbs. Commuters travel in all directions, but research could show a range of common standard commutes. Owners of businesses in those retail centres, and their staffs, are likely to live locally, while many industrial workers will have much longer commutes.
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On the local & regional government fronts, one of the major exercises of the last 15 years has been to plan, and plan, at exceedingly large cost to all the contributors to intended development. Among the outcomes, there’s a patchwork of catchment & structure plans, but now central government wants things to move faster. Was that a decade-plus of unnecessary caution on behalf of the receiving environment, or will the next decade be one where caution is thrown to the wind and the next generation is left to fix yet another mess?
One of the sub-headings in the NZIER study is this: “Many factors lift house prices but land use regulations matter”. Writing from a one-dimensional perspective of immediate financial cost, the NZIER researchers figured that the many rules & regulations for construction increase the price of a house.
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As the Motu research paper did, the NZIER research counts rules to ensure the building trades meet minimum standards as a cost, with no benefit taken into account.
The NZIER study paper refers to other constraints, too, such as maximum building heights affecting floor:area ratios. It says policies such as this that restrict land use “increase amenity in highly localised areas of the city but increase the cost of land through the rest of the city. As activity relocates elsewhere, demand to access the amenity in those areas increases, while restricting supply means people have to live further away. That pushes up the cost of development, not just in the local community but right across the city, as demand for housing shifts to other locations across the city.”
Both pieces of “research” amount to empty quote marks without the balancing input on the value of rules: If the rules kept developers from creating slums, those rules had more enduring value which should be taken into account.
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Full post and source: http://www.propbd.co.nz/economic-report-council-exhortation-relax-land-use-rules/
Just a quick note: We have a building code to ensure buildings are to minimum quality standards. Coupled with basic development controls via the Unitary Plan we should be avoiding slum or leaky building saga type situations. What we do have to watch though is development controls becoming overly anal and restrictive as they are in some places. When that happens then prohibitive costs start being implied on both housing supplier and the eventual demander – the consumer.
The Auckland Plan comes up for its three-yearly review where the Council has its first opportunity to alter the Auckland Plan substantially in order to adapt to the natural evolution of Auckland. After looking back at the last three years as well as looking forward to the next three I think I can safely conclude what should happen with the Auckland Plan after its review.
That is the simplest and most cost-effective thing to do is actually chuck it. Yes I mean chuck the Auckland Plan and start over from scratch. It wont effect the Unitary Plan but it will influence the Long Term Plan slightly so no need to worry there about those two plans needing a re-write.
Re-do the Auckland Plan based around the actual New Transport Network that starts being rolled out starting with South Auckland next year. Why? You will find development will follow what is essentially a hub and spoke model stemming out of the New Transport Network, especially if people want to move around efficiently.
How so? Something I will cover tomorrow 🙂
Talking Southern Auckland 