The Process and Politics of Intensification in Auckland: We’ve played it badly.

Is it possible to have a nuanced position on Auckland’s Unitary Plan? Is there a safe haven anywhere from which a person might acknowledge both the pressing need for Auckland to intensify, and Auckland Council’s utterly botched management of the process and politics? In late February 2016 the answer, depending on your position, would appear to be a resounding “sod off Nimby/whinging gen-exer”; but in the interests of reaching some kind of settlement about how this frustrating, writhing city grows, can we give it a try? Could we even attempt to imagine a future process to manage intensification questions that moves us up the scale from “full blown municipal conniption fit” to “suppose we can live with that”?

I want to start with a proposition from my days dealing with employment law. In a dispute about process and substance, you can’t just pick one. An employee who sexually harasses a colleague, is unlikely to get off scott-free because there was an error in the disciplinary process. Both process and substance will be considered together and any process deficiency will be measured against the substantive issue, its gravity, the ongoing risks, and a range of other factors. It’s quite possible that the employer will be hauled over the coals for the process failure, but that the employee will nonetheless be sent packing.

And so to the great Unitary Plan debate of late February 2016, focussed on ‘out of scope’ submissions. There’s something important to clear off at the outset. Without doubt, many of those who stormed the town hall this week under a banner of undue process, oppose the compact city model per se. The battle over ‘out of scope’ was a proxy for the fundamental dispute between those who support planned intensification and those who support something else. Does that mean that the complaints about process are wrong? I don’t believe so.

Puketapapa is my home patch, so I can speak most closely to the Unitary Plan experience here. You may know us as Mt Roskill. We’re the bit at the bottom of the Auckland Isthmus that sticks out into the Manukau. Auckland’s former bible-belt, we are now the most ethnically diverse community in New Zealand. We’re also the third most densely populated Local Board area in the region, after our Board-bretheren to the immediate north, Waitemata, and Albert-Eden. I’ve been on the Local Board here since 2010, and since pretty early in the piece we’ve had involvement in shaping up the Unitary Plan for our community. We found the process satisfactory up to the point of Proposal in late 2015. Since then, we have, quite independently of the recent eruption, felt uneasy and excluded by the out of scope alterations to the Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan (PAUP).

This can most easily be illustrated by reference to the area south of our eponymous Maunga. Broadly speaking, we call this area ‘Roskill South’. It’s pretty close to my home. This map shows how the area was zoned for the PAUP:

You’ll notice a few things. The area at the intersection of Dominion Rd and Richardson Rd is darker, denoting increased intensification. In this case, the local shops are surrounded by an area of ‘Mixed Housing Urban’ (MHU) that allows up to three story mid-intensity development. The previous ‘Notified’ version of the plan basically just surrounded the shops with ‘Mixed Housing Suburban’, which is your standard sub-dividable section with a two storey maximum. The up-zoning to MHU was specifically requested by our Board. We fundamentally support the compact city model and looked for ways to go up where possible while, as the Council meme went, ‘protecting the things that matter’. In this case we felt there was scope for greater development around the Roskill South shops. The area has good amenities and transport links, and locating more people around the village centre would bring it to life. We applied these same principles across the rest of our Board area. We supported an upzoning of Lynfield for the PAUP, and at earlier phases of the plan had supported significant upzoning of Stoddard Rd to turn it into a fully-fledged town centre with terraced housing and apartments, and despite the Three Kings Quarry controversy, we’d happily supported significant intensification around the adjacent town centre. There may have been a few Boards that more strongly supported intensification, but not many. We had quite a lot of engagement with our community and there was little opposition to these moves.

Now, scan your eyes a little up from the Roskill South town centre. You’ll see a patch of green. That’s Puketapapa/Mt Roskill, one of our maunga. Like most others it’s been pillaged over the years. In the 1950s its guts were ripped out for water infrastructure, and within the last ten years the mountain that has stood for millennia was nearly bowled for another Auckland motorway. We now feel pretty protective of it, and unlike many maunga in the posher parts of town, ours has never had protective zoning around its flanks to prevent it from being built out and further minimised. So, at the same time as we were finding places in Puketapapa to go up, we identified this as one of a small number of genuine sites to protect from further development. The protection is quite discreet — you’ll see the thin band of light coloured zoning, one property deep around the edge of the maunga. That’s single house zoning, and would largely restrict more intensive development. We also applied it around the edge of our other maunga, and in some ecologically sensitive coastal areas. Overall, the PAUP produced in Puketapapa did what it was supposed to do. It created significant intensification potential, while protecting genuine local treasures — not ‘every villa that ever lived’ as some have advocated.

So having done that, here’s what we get back from Council planners after the out of scope changes:

Notice the difference? The small band of protection around the maunga has gone. There was no discussion, no site specific reasoning, just a general planner line about “consistency”. Was there a specific submission requesting this change? I don’t know but doubt it. Possibly the dragnet Housing New Zealand (HNZ) submission which sought up-zoning of every HNZ area was seen to apply. The Local Board which had been most involved in the development of zoning in the area found out in the general information dump, and initial maps simply identified a change of zoning but didn’t tell us what it was. Could a conversation be held in which our carefully considered initial position could be taken into account? Does Donald Trump snack on falafel?

Another brief example. There is immense controversy about what happens inside Three Kings Quarry, but until recently, complete unanimity about how we should plan around it. The Local Board, Council planners, community, and even Fletchers, have consistently supported the development of an integrated ‘planning precinct’ in the area. The idea is that you link planning outcomes together across the quarry, town centre, and surrounding residential and commercial areas. This was the uncontested position at the point of the PAUP and the entire ‘Three Kings Plan’ document is based on the premise. Yet when the out of scope changes were announced, we found that the proposed planning precinct had been shrunk down to the quarry area only. This is a significant planning change enacted without any consultation or stated reasoning, and our Board now has to fight a rear-guard battle to try and re-instate a sound planning principle that everyone believed there was consensus around. It’s a mystery to us how this change came about, but one can postulate that the access and influence enjoyed by the developer may have played a part.

So yes, the process has been bad. There is in my view a fundamental problem when Council planners continue developing the position well past the point at which there can be genuine public engagement. Despite protestations to the contrary from friends on the pro-intensification side, the argument that the recent hearings process afforded genuine engagement is weak, as evidenced by Council’s own figures which show that a tiny proportion of the original submitters were able to engage in the dense, semi-legal hearings. In our case various carefully considered positions informed by local information were flicked off casually with no recourse. We hadn’t resisted intensification, we’d welcomed it — yet our local views were treated with contempt. I understand how some residents who genuinely engaged (as opposed to the hard-core antis) could have felt the same way.

How then to balance this process issue with the substance issues at stake? In one sense it could be argued that the substance of the “out of scope” changes are not large. After all, those in favour of the out of scope changes have run a defensive line that the net increase in properties that could potentially shift from the two storey to three storey bracket is only seven percent across the region (see below). If it’s the case that the PAUP is the cake, and the out of scope changes are simply a smear of ganache, has the angst of the past week been justifiable?

Does the fury, alarm, and sheer conceited nastiness (a small taster below) bear any relationship to the scale of change actually being proposed? It clearly doesn’t, and betrays much of the organised opposition as being opposed not to the relatively modest out of scope changes and associated (bad) process, but as holding a much deeper objection to the whole intensification project. And it’s at this point that I make the call that the majority on Council got it wrong this week. For just as the employment court will likely slam the employer for a bad disciplinary process, but also act to protect other employees from the sacked sexual harasser, it would have been entirely possible for Councillors to slam the arrogance of the officers who munged the process so badly, but to recognise that the greater injustice would be to settle for an urban form that allows for too few houses, and bluntly, pushes the poor, the young, and (very often) the brown away from home ownership and further and further towards the fringes. Transport Blog sets it out well here.

I spoke of my home town Roskill earlier. It has always been a place on the Isthmus where people have been able to get a start, put down roots, and grow into a settled community. Yet in my unglamorous street in Roskill South, modest homes are now going for over three hundred percent that paid by my wife and I thirteen years ago. The mixed nature of our community and its capacity to offer a start to young people, will be throttled unless we do everything that we reasonably can to build more quality, affordable houses. Of course zoning doesn’t answer all the questions — we need a more enlightened rule-book, heightened investment in social housing, a crack-down on speculation, and yes some sprawl (the UP allows for forty percent of the growth to occur outside existing areas), but without zoning that supports intensification, most of that is moot.

But we’ve landed here, and it may be that the out of scope debate has a limited impact on the final outcome. The Independent Hearings Panel will shape up the plan, and ironically Council’s withdrawal of evidence may mean that the submissions of other more aggressive intensifiers such as Housing New Zealand, figure more prominently. A Unitary Plan with scope for enhanced intensification will likely emerge. There may be appeals, private plan changes and all the rest, but as Simon Wilson writes here, there is real scope for intensification to begin winning the day, not by force of argument, but by example.

If there is a lesson to be learned out of the current saga it is that while the process has been bad, the politics have been worse. The Mayor’s failure to develop a durable political majority around the central governing project of his second term has been badly exposed, and at the community level, those of us who support intensification must stop and reflect on how we’ve come to be so comprehensively out-gunned.

A large part of the issue in my view is the technocratic vanguard who brilliantly produce the data and advance the arguments for intensification, but whose adherence to the vision can be dogmatic and anti-democratic. You either support every proposal to intensify to the maximum level possible, or you’re a NIMBY. I’m that guy — I’ve been part of a Board that has upzoned our community more than virtually any other, and supported all but one SHA that has come our way (including one that fits the definition of in my backyard), but for working with our local community to propose an alternative development scheme (involving five storey apartment blocks) for Three Kings Quarry that takes into account the neighbouring maunga, we’re pretty clearly viewed as heretical by many on team pro-intensification.

The anti-democratic technocratic impulse was on full display in the wake of this week’s vote. Pro-intensification campaigners flooded social media calling for “Commissioners to be brought in”. Sorry, but when you’ve lost a democratic debate, the answer shouldn’t be to do away with democracy, it should be to ask; “why did we lose, and how do we win next time?”.

Let’s be clear, the shift to a denser city is a major social and political project and if we wish to achieve it, we will need to build a political constituency for it that is bigger than the one that was just smashed up. The queasiness about politics needs to go out the window. That doesn’t mean partisanship, but recognising that real power is needed to win. This week, Auckland 2040 flexed muscle and changed votes. Those of us who support intensification need to work out how to win public support and votes, or face further push-backs.

A big part of that is actually engaging with people’s real concerns. Those who believe that it’s effective to tell people over and over again that they are wrong, need to step back just so slightly and reflect on how the debate about public transport in Auckland has been so successfully prosecuted over the past ten years. Yes there was good data and robust pushing back against mis-information, but the task of building a political constituency has been front and centre of campaigns from Gen Zero and CBT. The messages have been positive and optimistic, politicians have been brought into the fold, and well-executed modern campaigns have built up a broad coalition of supporters in the community. What would a campaign for more houses in Auckland look like if it was run along similar lines?

And finally, is there a way to structure the discussion about intensification with communities in a way that actually gives people confidence that going up can be a good thing? The fear of top-down change to communities is real and should be respected, not simply written off. How would it be if we radically re-set the incentives, so that communities and developers were encouraged to work together, and so that the benefits of development more directly flowed to people in the locale? Developers who want to do more than permitted under the UP and who are committed to quality development could pitch and negotiate directly with communities, skirting the Resource Consent process. Local people could decide democratically whether they are willing to go up more — and here’s the incentive part; those communities who do agree to intensify, would benefit directly. Instead of the current opaque Development Contributions system, a portion of the money would go directly into providing agreed amenities in that area. Communities that play their part in building up will get new parks, upgraded libraries, and tarted up town centres. Word will get round quick.

That’s a good place to end. My time in local government has shown me that local communities are endlessly creative and open, if only they are given real agency. That’s been the stuff-up here. Council has alienated people through poor process, and those of us who support intensification have failed to engender wide-spread public support for the project. We can’t blame and name call for that, we need to work out how we do it better. Auckland needs this to work, and we have to start seeing our local communities as the keys to success, not as impediments.