Designing Sustainable Resilient Medium Density Housing Well. A Discussion of the Design Implication of the Auckland Unitary Plan and the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Act

Numerous studies, reports, and articles in the general media discussing housing in Aotearoa New Zealand’s cities have been published in the period since Auckland Council adopted the current version of its strategy for intensifying the city, now well embedded as the Auckland Unitary Plan of 2016 (AUP). It is widely accepted in the literature of urban planning that medium density housing “done well” offers a sustainable pathway to urban growth. Central government introduced the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Act (New Zealand Government Environment Committee. Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. (83–1). Wellington: NZ, 2021) to Parliament in November 2021. The Amendment Act endorses higher density by introducing more “permissive” regulations. The revisions now passed into law in Wellington remove provisions in the AUP that provide for the regulation of density by zoning; they reduce minimum standards for internal and external private space, and they increase permitted building heights while reducing boundary proximities. They over-ride the evidence-based and documented research that went into the AUP, which was also validated by exhaustive community consultation. A majority of expert opinion expressed in a brief process of public consultation predicted that the Act’s effect will be to create a legacy of poor-quality housing for Auckland. Preliminary analyses emerging from a survey carried out by the Unitec Housing Research Group of post-2016 examples of housing projects now suggests that while some developments reach a standard of design that compares reasonably well with housing overseas, a majority do not. This paper examines positive and negative outcomes of the current regulatory regime using data from the Housing Research Group surveys. Conclusions indicate that, with fine-tuning, mechanisms that already exist within the AUP can achieve policy objectives to “do medium density well”.