$1 billion Fletcher/Crown housing development — Christchurch CBD.
A case study of how our government approaches urban development.
The Christchurch post-earthquakes rebuild is peaking and construction activity will plateau for a while before tailing off. So this is a good time to review the Christchurch CBD rebuild model.
Five parts:
1. The $1 billion Fletcher/Crown housing development.
2. The Crown/Fletcher development within the context of the Christchurch rebuild and national economy.
3. Is the Fletcher/Crown development exploitative?
4. Is there another explanation?
5. Is there another solution?
Part one: The $1 billion Fletcher/Crown housing project
A little over a decade ago in 2002 before I was married, I bought a small two bedroom, single garage townhouse in Kilmore Street in Central Christchurch for $160,000 on a single nurse’s salary. A decade later, after a series of devastating earthquakes in Christchurch, the Crown decided to take control of fourteen hectares of land. Seven hectares of that land, just a few blocks from my old townhouse, is being developed as part of the Eastern Frame development of the CBD rebuild.
So it is with great interest I follow the design/development stage of this process, in which Fletchers has negotiated an exclusive deal with the Crown to develop this large block of prime land. This development will be a mixture of apartments and townhouses. The Eastern Frame is approximately 20% of the inner city core of Christchurch. So the success or otherwise of this development will have a significant impact on New Zealand’s second largest city.
The East Frame is set on a 14 hectare site between Manchester and Madras Streets, and extends from Lichfield Street in the south to immediately north of the Ōtākaro/Avon River. It has easy access to a bus super stop on its west, Latimer Square to its East, the Innovation Precinct and CPIT to its south and the Margaret Mahy Family Playground to its North….
Half of the area will be developed into medium density residential living for approximately 2,200 people….. The other half of the East Frame will form open spaces and streets, including a central park running north to south, with walking and cycling paths, community gardens….
A simple division of the projected monetary size of development and the number housing units it will create, indicates the average price will be in excess of $800,000. A price that is out of reach from those on a nurse’s salary, in stark contrast to my experiences a little over a decade ago.
The Eastern Frame development is the biggest Government housing project in Christchurch. In combination with two other smaller Government housing projects, this provides more than $1 billion of work for Fletchers. The Eastern Frame project is budgeted to be worth $800 million and when completed it will have nearly a thousand residences. The first homes being planned to be ready in 18 months with the project expected to take 8 or 9 years to complete. The deal between the Crown and Fletcher is a profit sharing contract. This includes upfront payments to the Crown and further payments as sales are made. Simply put, as Fletcher completes and sells residences it shares the profits with the Crown.
Brownlee said there would be no loss to the Crown in terms of the sale of land to Fletchers. “Excluding the public realm there’s no loss on the land sold, to the Crown.” He would not give financial details and said the public land could eventually pass over to the care of the city council.
….Cera development director Rob Kerr said Fletcher had delivered the most compelling vision on the staged process. “As Fletchers sell more and more property, they’ll be paying us for the land. Depending exactly on how much they sell and how quickly they sell, that’s how much (land) we’ll sell.”…….
Mike Greer, a member of an opposing group who bid for the project was less impressed with this model of urban development and has spoken out about his concerns.
The unsuccessful bidders are putting on a brave face, but builder Mike Greer is more prepared to speak his mind.
Greer is hugely disappointed his bid with Philip Carter and Ngai Tahu failed to be selected by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority. He said the consortium had a top team including architects Warren and Mahoney and top Australian architect firm Woods Bagot…..
“They (Fletcher) are obviously doing a very good sell job to the Government, aren’t they. “I’m pretty disappointed a local bid didn’t get it. I think it’s pretty sad for Canterbury.” A local bid would have produced something much better, in his view.
“I guess they (Fletcher) offered more for the land than we did, that would be the biggest carrot for the Government, wouldn’t it.”
Greer said their proposal was “taller”, some eight storey apartment buildings, because they were planning for future population growth as well. It comprised 1200 apartments and townhouses in a price range of $300,000 to $1 million. The main part of their project was aimed at middle New Zealanders.
“We wanted to encourage policemen and nurses and all those kinds of people that work in the city to live in the city.”
“I think we would have created something far better for the people of Canterbury than what they are going to get.” “My biggest concern is they go offshore…to sell these as investment properties.” That would be devastating for the city, in his view.
It cost the consortium $600,000 spent to make the bid. “To be honest the whole process was a bit of a shemozzle, an absolute waste of money. I won’t be doing any bids ever again.” “Our proposal was probably far too fancy for the Government, it looked after the people of Christchurch too much and didn’t provide a massive economic return for the bidder and the Government. Our bid was focused on building something world class.”
“It’s a funny old world this post earthquake world. There’s more politicking on houses than I ever imagined,” Greer said.
Part 2. The Crown/Fletcher development within the context of the Christchurch rebuild and national economy
This is the hoped for Christchurch after the CBD is successfully developed.
To get an impression of where Fletchers intends to build, follow this link for pictures of the Christchurch city environment as it is now in 2015. You will see pictures of a damaged city core. Suburbs close to the centre of city abandoned due to the liquefaction risk. New suburbs being built further out, many in satellite towns like Rolleston and Lincoln.
Before the earthquakes, there were 6000 businesses in the central city, the area bounded by the four avenues, with a daily working population of 51,000. About 7000 residents lived in some 3500 households, mainly in the north-east corner. The hospital - one of the largest in Australasia - remains a big employer and government workers are coming back as damaged governmental buildings are repaired or replaced. However, the private sector commercial rebuild is slow, with many businesses committed to long term leases elsewhere in the city. Many offices have been built outside of Christchurch Central Development Units (CCDU) control west of the city centre on Lincoln Road and Victoria Street.
How much has the Crown spent on rebuilding Christchurch? Much less than people realise is chartered accountant Cam Preston’s answer. There was a significant initial amount of support, but since then the Crown has gone about reducing expectations and focusing on national issues rather than local rebuild goals - such as the government getting back into surplus. This has had ramifications for how the Eastern Frame development evolved.
Preston says what also catches his accountant’s eye is the way the Government used the cost share to capitalise as much of the Blueprint spending as possible.
That is, projects were treated not as operating expenditure — cash spending that would affect that year’s surplus calculation — but instead as a capital investment, something that was being bought by the state to produce an eventual financial return.
Once capitalised like this, the provision could be entered in a different column — rolled into the general national debt, the $80b of borrowings, to which no one was paying much attention.
As an accounting trick, Preston says the corporate world does this all the time. An expense becomes an asset. But it has consequences. It builds in assumptions that later have to be realised.
Take the $400m the Government has spent on compulsorily acquiring land for the anchor projects. That is money going out the door in any particular year. But because the land has been booked as a capital asset, it doesn’t come off the surplus figure. Rather it is something new the Crown owns as a positive investment.
Of course the expense will have to be reconciled one day when the anchor project actually gets built. If the Crown simply gives an anchor to the city as a gift — as people seemed to be getting the impression would be the case with the metro sports facility, the convention centre, the green frame — then suddenly that land investment will have zero value. Its purchase price has to be recognised as a cash out-going.
Or even if the Government has to acknowledge a write-down of the booked land value — as it very well might with the East Frame being sold now for apartment blocks having been bought originally at commercial building land prices — then again, ouch, a direct hit on the budget surplus column.
Preston says this is where some of the delays and secrecy that surround the anchor projects start to make more sense. The cost share shuffled a large chunk of the promised core Crown spend — he calculates $3.6b of the $8b non-EQC money — safely out of the surplus spotlight. The question is then when can the Government afford to take the hits involved in parking the expense?
For instance, it was an open secret that Fletcher Living had won the East Frame tender earlier this year. However the official announcement was bafflingly delayed until just the other week — a few days after the June 30 close of the 2014/2015 financial year.
And even then the Government was opaque about any write-downs. Brownlee claimed the Crown would see no loss on the land value. It would get back what it paid, he says.
However Fletcher will be acquiring the land over a decade to do the apartments in stages. And there is a complicated profit sharing arrangement that will not be finalised until the end of this year. Preston says all this looks like a way to keep the land cost tucked away on the right side of the surplus ledger.
For some reason Canterbury finds it hard to negotiate its local interest against national pressures. There is a despondency amongst locals that public bodies or services can be of help. There is much bitterness against all the government institutions involved in the rebuild. Both those representing the Crown — Brownlee, CCDU, CERA and Commissioner appointed Ecan and those representing the local interest — CCC.
Canterbury’s poor record of receiving national public spending for local infrastructure can best be seen in transport funding. The Canterbury and Wellington regions are of similar size, population and economy. Although Canterbury is the faster growing region. Yet somehow Wellington has 150km of passenger rail and, once Transmission Gully is finished, 100km of motorways. Meanwhile, once Christchurch’s Northern and Southern motorways and bypasses are completed it will have something like 30–40 km of motorways and no passenger rail. This being despite Canterbury having some of the easiest conditions for transport infrastructure construction and significant need for it.
Peter Nunns from Transport blog said back in March regarding transport spending from 2002/03 to 2011/12.
A few things jump out from the chart. The first is that NZTA’s spent slightly more than it raised from fuel taxes, road user charges, and other sources. The second is that there are some big disparities between revenue and expenditure in some regions. In particular: Auckland and Wellington are getting about 20–25% more in NZTA expenditure than they pay in revenue, while Canterbury is getting only slightly more than half as much expenditure as it pays in revenue.
The newly elected Christchurch City Council have a positive vision for the future of Canterbury in which the Council and the Crown work together to create a much larger and more cohesive region, connecting a successful dense core to affordable more dispersed satellite towns. So far this vision has gained little traction at the national level.
The goal of Canterbury having 2 million people by 2050 may seem grandiose, but there is no doubt that Canterbury is one of New Zealand’s faster growing regions. With the right support, New Zealand could have a second international sized city - comparable to Adelaide. Christchurch is of a size and has the geography that with the right planning policies, infrastructure provision and a competitive/productive construction industry, new developments –homes and businesses could be built very affordably. An affordable growing Christchurch would contribute a lot to rebalancing New Zealand’s economy. Whether this happens or not is reflected in the large degree of uncertainty in Canterbury’s growth projections from Statistics NZ. Which range from either keeping up with Auckland to barely growing at all.
A growing successful international sized city needs a functional inner city area. Will the Fletcher/Crown development provide this for Christchurch?
Part 3: Is the Fletcher/Crown development exploitative?
What did Mike Greer mean by “politicking on houses”? If one uses standard urban economic geography analysis to examine this situation we get some understanding of what he might of meant (note I have never met Mike Greer so this is an educated guess). The following graphs show how key variables of a typical city change from the centre to the edge of the city.
Visually these graphs would depict the following type of city.
The key point is that house and land prices are typically higher in the city centre and decline towards the edge of the city. For cities it really is all about location, location, location.
Why are centrally located properties worth more than peripheral ones?
- Centrally located properties are closer to public and private amenities — shops, parks, restaurants, entertainment, customers, employees and places of employment. This is a basic geometric law — the centre of a circle is the point closest to all other points within the circle. Note as cities get bigger they evolve secondary peaks and move from monocentric to polycentric. Also views, sun, proximity to waterfronts and other factors can skew this otherwise simple model but as a general rule the model is quite predictive.
So when one is discussing the property prices of a city you are really talking about a 3D curve. With site prices varying with location –x and y dimensions. But a city can be built in three dimensions –X,Y,Z or ‘out and up’. Businesses and residents choose where to locate themselves based on price, land area, floor area and whether to be more centrally or peripherally located.
The key features of the graphs being how high the central values are, what the median value is and how low the peripheral values are.
Actual land values in Greater Christchurch vary from industrial land in Izone Park and Carter’s Group Iport in Rolleston 20km South of Christchurch. A price list obtained by NBR shows lots being advertised for $125 a square metre up to $160 a square metre (in Rolleston). According to an industrial specialist Greg Mann, the price of similar land closer to the city at Wigram is $300–350 a square metre and at Hornby $225 a square metre. This price rises to around $1000 a square metre for the Crown’s purchases of central city land of the Eastern Frame and $3000 to $3,500 a square metre for land under the proposed convention centre adjacent to Cathedral square.
To reduce median property values to get affordable housing, the whole curve has to move lower, site prices in real terms have to be stable or falling in all locations. Construction costs have to be falling or at least stable for all locations. Then competition from cheaper new builds will cap rising prices of existing property.
There is an argument that cities need a supply vent that can quickly respond to increased demand to prevent excessive increases in land and property prices. That supply vent needs to be some combination of ‘up and out’. Typically affordable housing advocates such as Demographia argue that access to cheaper rural price fringe land through the competition effect keeps more centrally located city land prices lower and therefor median property prices affordable. They argue ‘up’ by itself is not enough to keep the property market stable. This article will focus on the other end of the market, on whether there is competition in the inner city section of the Christchurch property price curve. The underlying question is: does this section of the market need competition too?
Affordable housing has been a stated aim of this government since prior to their first election in 2008. How have their actions in rebuilding Christchurch since the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 been towards achieving this aim?
The business model of the Fletcher/Crown agreement is that this entity would use it monopolistic control over a large part of the centre of Christchurch to extract the maximum profit possible from both the underlying land and the housing units. In other words to push up the city centre section of the property price curve as high as possible. It is hard to reconcile this monopolistic profit maximising business model against the governments long expressed goal of improving housing affordability.
Monopolistic suppliers achieve pricing power by restricting the amount supplied to the market in such a way that prices rise. In the real estate game this is called land banking. Typically land bankers exploit the difference between rising demand and inadequate new supply -delayed due to regulatory or infrastructure failure. The suspicion is that Fletchers Christchurch CBD development will price for the top dollar and if it doesn’t achieve that, it will slow construction down, until it receives the desired price. At the time Eastern Frame land was acquired by the Crown (with the threat of compulsory acquisition) many land owners questioned the morality of this “land banking acquisition process”. Many commenting on the Press’s article “Owners riled by eastern frame plan”. Here is a few examples.
Stolenbytheccdu 666 days ago
“Brownlee said the Crown did not stand to profit from on-selling parcels of frame land.” yeah right. The prices they paid for the eastern frame were low. The Government stole that land.
Freethinker 666 days ago
Great to hear Govt will make no profit on land sales so there will be no reason not to disclose the govts purchase and sale price and if there is a profit this can returned to the owners — and father christmas will visit all believers on 25/12 with a sack of goodies!!!
There has been an apartment building boom in many Australasian cities, sites for apartments have doubled in price in the past three years in Sydney, constructions costs are also rising. Vancouver in Canada is facing similar pressures. Is the Fletchers/Crown profit maximising entity trying to capture some of that boom? Australian and Canadian business commentators indicate the key driver of this apartment building and property price boom is off-shore investors. So Mike Greer may be right in that the CBD rebuild is not to service the local Christchurch community in an affordable manner. Instead, it is designed to create unearned capital gains opportunities for those outside of Christchurch. In the first instance the beneficiaries will be the Fletchers/Crown profit sharing partnership, whose priorities are nationally focused, rather than giving back to the Christchurch community. Off-shore property investors with a capital gains business model are a potential second wave of non-community beneficiaries.
The above analysis points towards a deliberate exploitative process, that the government is not interested in its market regulator duty of ensuring the property market provides affordable housing and low property related input costs for business. But the deliberate part may not be true, Gerry Brownlee the Earthquake Recovery minister firmly rejects any ‘conspiracy theory’ accusations of favouritism between the Crown and Fletchers.
Part 4: An alternative explanation?
An alternative to the exploitative explanation is that the governing ‘elite’ response to the Christchurch earthquakes has exhibited a cargo cult mentality (definition of cargo cult here). Eric Crampton a Canterbury University economist who has recently moved to Wellington to work for the NZ Initiative wrote about this thinking behind the desire for higher Central Christchurch property prices in government circles.
The Blueprint produced by the Christchurch Central Development Unit purpose was the following, as reported by The NZ Herald in 2012, “The frame, in tandem with zoning provisions, reduces the extent of the central city commercial area so that the oversupply of land is addressed,” says the Blueprint. “It will help to increase the value of properties generally across the central city in a way that regulations to contain the central core, or new zoning decisions, could not.” The document goes on to say a further purpose of the frame is to create a buffer zone for the core to expand in the future — “if there is demand for housing or commercial development”.
Eric described this thinking as;
Because successful cities have high downtown property prices, they thought they could make Christchurch successful by forcing prices to be high. Well, that doesn’t work: high prices in successful cities reflect that people get a lot of value from being located in great downtowns, not the other way around.
Eric Crampton’s analysis (articles here and here) indicate the Fletcher/Crown high property price business model is a risky strategy for redeveloping Christchurch. It is a big ‘all your eggs in the one basket’ project. The risk being that the fundamental amenity value of Central Christchurch has fallen, not risen. There are less businesses, shops, workers in Central Christchurch than previously. Long-term inner city Christchurch problems of transport and parking have been put in the ‘too hard’ basket and left for another generation to solve. Christchurch itself lost just over 2000 residents or nearly 1% of its population between the 2006 and 2013 censuses. Meanwhile the neighbouring Cantabrian councils of Waimakiriri grew by about 6500, or by close to 20%; Selwyn grew by 8700 — more than a third. Eric Crampton states these facts indicate prices and rents in downtown Christchurch, in particular the east side of the CBD should fall -not rise. A local property developer explains why.
Developer Ernest Duval, founder of the post-quake property owner’s group, City Owners Rebuild Entity (Core), says the whole dynamic of central Christchurch has lurched decisively west.
“If you look, all the people-focused amenities are on the west of the city. The new Metro Sports Centre, the museum, the Botanical Gardens, the Arts Centre — all of the things people want close by are on that side.”
Duval says Cathedral Square once told its own story. It was the city’s transport hub and cinema centre. It was the natural place of ceremony and assembly.
Yet under the Government’s blueprint plan, even the civic welcoming function of Cathedral Square is to be shifted over to Victoria Square. The idea is to make that the new bicultural front door to the city, a greeting place developed in partnership with Ngai Tahu.
Duval says because of the square’s threatened loss of post-quake identity, the surrounding blocks reaching down towards Manchester St have become problematic in turn.
The contagion now threatens the Government’s East Frame, its plan to sell off six expensively acquired blocks of land, stretching from the Avon River to Lichfield Street, for inner-city apartments.
Barnaby Bennett a designer and editor is a critic of the proposed convention centre. His argument (same link) has similar themes to the cargo cult mentality argument for the Eastern Frame in that what is happening is a result of stress and the need for the governing elite to appear in control.
Bennett says after disasters, the popular view is that it is the communities that can’t cope. There is looting and dysfunction. But as Christchurch found out, the opposite is mostly the case.
….. it is instead the elite who fear they have the most to lose economically. “In the quest to appear to be in control, they often make foolish large decisions,” says Bennett.
He says it is the only reason he can see for the convention centre being made so large and taking over such a prime spot.
The Government forced through a purchase of all the properties between the square and the bend of the Avon River. It even decided to build over Gloucester Street without public consultation, saying it might make a nice internal shopping arcade.
I think Eric, Earnest and Barnaby are right and the result will be inner city Christchurch, especially on the east side, will be a sterile, expensive and a slowly built place compared to similar sized cities. Unless a new direction is found, this is a massive missed opportunity. The Canterbury region is New Zealand’s second largest region. Its population is growing much faster than the similar sized Wellington region and is only second to Auckland for population growth in the country. An expensive inner city area will reinforce the Canterbury trend of extreme decentralisation whereby businesses leave the centre and residents leave the city for neighbouring satellite towns and lifestyle blocks.
Part 5: Is there an alternative model to re-developing a city centre?
The fundamental problem is how to increase amenity value without increasing property prices? How to return the amenity value created by the presence and enterprise of the community back to that community rather than to some passive site owner benefiting from increased land prices due to the efforts of others?
Obviously this is a big issue that has troubled theorists for a long time.
I will not suggest any general solutions but I will suggest a model different from Fletchers or even Mike Greer’s might have been more effective for re-developing Christchurch’s earthquake damaged inner core, in particular the Eastern Frame.
I think there was some logic for a government agency in buying up large blocks of land to ensure there is some consistency in what was rebuilt. Although it could be argued the fairest, fastest and simplest way for inner city Christchurch to rebuild would be to let the original owners to rebuild as they saw fit, but with a modern earthquake code buildings. This is what London in the most part did after the Great Fire of London. All the grand plans were eventually rejected by the Crown because of disinterested uncooperative locals and due to the fear of rioting. The major difference between the new and old London being the dictate to build in stone not wood. I believe the major flaw in the Christchurch CBD rebuild is the monopolistic nature of the process.
The eastern side of Christchurch CBD has always been the low cost, alternative, hippy and creative side of the city centre. Enterprises like start-up photography companies had premises in this part of town. Rod Donald the former co-leader of the Green party had his offices at 16 Bedford Row, which is now part of Fletchers Eastern Frame development. The interests of this ‘smaller’ end of town have not been considered in the rebuild model.
If the Crown had repackaged/planned the sites in some sort of logical way and released them back onto the market at cost for hundreds of local site owners/developers (original site owners getting the first right of purchase) to rebuild for their needs I think the community would have been better served.
Something similar to this proposal was done in Amsterdam when they redeveloped an old industrial wharf for housing and commercial space.
This being the Borneo Sporenberg project. This project was discussed in the Transportblog article Multiplication through Subdivision in 2013, as it is the inspiration for the Auckland development Vinegar Lane and some suggested changes to the Unitary plan.
Another way to look at the Borneo Sporenburg development is it is a modern version of the traditional Euro-bloc.
These are efficient high density residential building spaces because they create about 100 residential units per hectare - comparable to apartment buildings. But without the need for the same height and expensive infrastructure such as elevators. Further because each site is developed independently, each site has its own stairs and every floor has lighting and cross ventilation to the street and courtyard. This is important because if there is only one set of stairs for a group of sites and a long communal corridor it would break each floor in two, limiting light and ventilation.
The CCDU has a list of settled Crown purchases in Central Christchurch. This includes scores of purchases for the Eastern Frame. Prices ranged from $1829sqm for a 267–271 Madras St address down to $330sqm for 7 Liverpool St. With the typical prices being around the $1000sqm level. Unfortunately we don’t have the price that Fletchers pays the Crown or the details of the profit sharing agreement. So we cannot know if the Crown is making a profit or loss on land sales, if the Crown paid too much or too little for the land, although Brownlee assures us the Crown will not realise a loss.
With the CCDU purchase price figures we can do some back of the envelope calculations for our Euro-bloc build.
Let’s say the Euro-bloc courtyard developments are divided into sites that are between 7 and 10 metres wide and 10 metres deep, with a further 6 metres deep of internal courtyard space for car parking or other uses. With a height of 3 stories and the possibility of roof-top terraces.
For a 7 metre wide Euro-bloc site.
- The whole site is 7 x (10 + 6) =112sqm
- The building envelope would be 7m x 10m x 3 stories high = 210sqm.
- Set the selling price for the sites at say $2000sqm, thus allowing for $1000sqm in development costs to construct paths, cycle-ways, parks etc. This means site cost is $224,000 for the 7m wide site. Note this is a comparable price to a suburban Christchurch section but at 112sqm it is one fifth the size i.e. five times more expensive –so consistent with the standard city land price curve.
- Building cost for this sort of site could be expensive –maybe $3000sqm so $630,000 in building costs.
- Total land plus build cost being $850,000.
- For this you would get 210sqm of floor space, easily 4 bedrooms and multiple living spaces, a large rooftop terrace and parking in the courtyard. Alternatively you could break the space up to a ground floor commercial space. A small middle floor apartment and another top floor apartment with a roof top terrace. It is easy to imagine other ways of dividing the space between large to small residential versus commercial spaces.
- The total build would be beyond a young nurse’s wage, but one floor, at a third of the cost, so $300,000 for a 60sqm (10sqm is lost to communal spaces –like stairs) being a large one bedroom apartment would not be.
Would this sort of Euro-bloc development be better than the Fletchers/Crown partnership CBD development?
I think it would for the following reasons.
- Although land plus build costs are comparable to what Fletchers proposes, I doubt Fletchers apartments and townhouses will offer 210sqm of space, with parking and a large outside space.
- Hundreds of site owners competitively completing their own builds with no ‘monopoly’ incentive to delay would likely build faster than 8 or 9 years. Some sites could probably have been started to be developed before now - 5 years after the first earthquake.
- A modern version of the Euro-bloc would have street appeal that would attract people to the area. A fast developing, dynamic, low cost inner city residential/commercial area would add amenity value to the city.
- The Euro-bloc proposal would be more responsive to the market/communities changing demand or preferences for inner city space –being able to flexibly change between small (60sqm) to large (210sqm) residential spaces and to switch from residential to commercial space.
- The Euro-bloc proposal would allow original inner city landlords a way to be part of the rebuild, thus discouraging capital flight. It would maintain a large locally engaged productive capital base as opposed to encouraging passive ‘capital gains orientated’ absentee ownership of property.
In conclusion I think there is serious flaws in the Christchurch rebuild model because it only considered the needs of a limited number of property developers and the Crown, whilst ignoring the opportunity to create a broader community of beneficiaries.
