Auckland has a housing crisis. Too many people, too few houses. Scarcity fuels demand. House prices have escalated, leaving affordable homes in their wake.

The government wants action. Councils everywhere, but particularly in Auckland, feel the pressure.

“Government have a national policy statement requiring all Councils in growth areas to have sufficient urban capacity,” says Noel Reardon, Heritage Manager for Auckland Council.

More housing requires more land. The council developed the Unitary Plan, a master planning guide (now legislation) designed to meet Auckland's economic and housing needs. It determines what can be built and where, and how to create a higher quality and more compact Auckland.

A more compact city means increasing density (densification), in other words, finding “available” land and building more dwellings on it. That might be a piece of land with a single house that can be demolished and replaced with a multi-storied dwelling - low or high rise - better utilising the land.

“Say you've got a big heritage mansion that's on a 2,000 square metre site in Remuera. The moment that goes on the market, someone is going to come in and bowl that and develop the whole site. And even on a smaller site, you've got a little Vernon Brown house which is deliberately bach-like and humble but it’s in Remuera. Someone is going to buy that site and bowl that. It's the site location,” says Bill McKay, senior lecturer at Auckland University School of Architecture.

Land might be in the form of a greenfield site (undeveloped land) which can be rezoned residential.

“There are the Stonefields where Fletchers got approval for a special housing area over what is claimed to be a significant Maori site,” says Noel. “For greenfield projects, the council does a structural programme and addresses the heritage values and we engage with iwi. That’s all included in that process. But for special housing areas, they get fast tracked. And whether those same processes happen … I don’t know.”

View the map of Auckland through the lens of the Unitary Plan and the areas of densification are shown in orange, spread haphazardly across the city, with, according to Stephen Selwood, Chief Executive of Infrastructure Auckland, limited infrastructure connectivity. In itself, this has undesirable long-term consequences. It also points to a solution that meets the city’s housing demands without compromising heritage.

“The irony of it is that you’ll intensify and then you’ll realise that you’ll have to retrofit the infrastructure which is now going to be much more expensive with much more opposition because naturally communities are going to react adversely,” says Stephen.

Additional transport networks, like light rail down Dominion Rd, often trigger conflicts with heritage and character areas.

Does the Unitary Plan and its response to the housing crisis pose a threat to our built and natural heritage? The aim of the Unitary Plan is to lubricate developments and to rapidly increase dwellings, with a particular emphasis on affordable houses.

“The Unitary Plan,” says Bill, has turned the tap on for growth.”

Obstacles to development have been removed from the consent process. Like the elimination of notifiable consents in order to expedite the consent process, an initiative of Nick Smith, the previous Minister for Building, Housing and the Environment,. Notifications allowed affected parties to a development, like neighbours, an opportunity to have a say. Under this new legislation, notifications are not part of the consent process.

“One of the big issues in Auckland is around notification of consent applications. Notification in the Resource Management Act was changed to say that if it’s an application for residential dwellings in a residential area it can't be notified. So the neighbours won't know,” says Noel.

If a developer purchases a number of character villas with the intention of building a block of flats, it is now, by law, a non notifiable consent process. The implications are clear.

“There's a lot less protection in the Unitary Plan than before. There is far less opportunity for communities to have input to say what goes - significantly less notification and less protection. The Unitary Plan was aimed at removing as many constraints to development as possible,” says Sally Hughes, spokesperson for the Character Coalition, an umbrella group for around 70 groups.

Pressure and politics meant the Unitary Plan was fast tracked into existence. Council catalogued and identified heritage through robust area studies, with some 30,000 properties being afforded protection. For character areas, they applied a “character overlay,” which affords some protection. The Unitary Plan states: “The Special Character Areas Overlay seeks to retain and manage the special character values of specific residential and business areas identified as having collective and cohesive values, importance, relevance and interest to the communities within the locality and wider Auckland region.”

Time constraints, however, have meant that some areas of character and historic merit remain unassessed and therefore vulnerable to development.

“You can always argue that more should be protected in the Unitary Plan and the protection mechanisms should be better but we've just come out of the Unitary Plan process where all that has been considered and we are adding more scheduled buildings. We’ve just added another 48 buildings to the schedule, so it's a constant process. It's a moot point whether its adequate,” says Noel.

Robin Byron, Heritage Advisor Architecture with Heritage New Zealand, while supportive of Council's “robust” approach to the city’s heritage protection, is more direct. “The problem was that the pressure of time to push through the Unitary Plan meant there were a lot of areas that were left unexamined.”

Allan Matson, president of Civic Trust Auckland, a heritage group that has just celebrated its 50th anniversary, argues that insufficient resources were applied to proper assessment of heritage areas and that the need for housing has overridden the importance of preserving our heritage for the long term.

“The Unitary Plan does not balance the protection of heritage with the provision for more housing. Instead it prioritises housing over heritage, and this predictably is enabling the destruction of some of the city’s valued heritage,” he says.

Exacerbating the problem is defining heritage. What's actually at risk here?

Heritage NZ have properties which are listed - but not protected. Council have properties which are scheduled - and protected. Allan and Bill have advocated for more properties to be both listed and scheduled simultaneously.

Robin sees the value of heritage listing and scheduling as separate functions.

“Listing is for identification, knowledge and the public to know about. It's helpful to be both listed and scheduled because we can have an advocacy function. As an autonomous Crown entity we have a role to act in a professional capacity for heritage. That’s a mandate, but we don't have the same political pressure that Council might.”

“Heritage NZ lists sites and that listing has no statutory protection,” says Noel. “It does not have to go through the Resource Management Act process. Scheduling does. It has statutory protection and has to go through the RMA process, which is contestable. In a Heritage NZ context, listing a property is the be-all and end-all. In Council’s process, even if something has heritage value, the planning test might say it’s not worth protecting for other reasons. We lost a number of heritage buildings because of growth. The planning side of things was considered more important than protecting the heritage building. So that did happen through the Unitary Plan.”

There are many sites, predominantly streets with character dwellings, which are neither listed nor scheduled and yet have a significant impact on the character and culture of our city.

“You've got a street of bungalows. It may not be heritage with a capital ‘H’ but it gives character to that area,” says Bill.

Sally agrees that the areas most vulnerable to development in the push for additional housing are character areas and this is having a major impact on heritage overall. “The Council does have a very good heritage team and they do look after the scheduled buildings but where the great losses are occuring are in the special character areas and the areas that don't have protection. So heritage in the broader term is being very significantly impacted.”

It’s not just built heritage that is affected. “I would argue the impact on the region's heritage is on cultural heritage, particularly Maori cultural heritage, and that has always occurred through greenfields development,” says Noel Reardon. “So this is land being urbanised. It's not common for heritage buildings to be demolished and replaced with apartments, whereas you get a lot of greenfield development happening and earthworks, and that could destroy Maori cultural sites.”

Has the housing crisis affected our heritage? Growth at any time applies pressure on a dwindling resource: land. This in turn places heritage under the spotlight.

“It’s growth that has the impact in Auckland and always has been the underlying issue. The housing crisis is just a blip,” says Noel.

The demands of Auckland's rapid growth and the Council's current planning methodology of creating a compact city threaten built heritage, character dwellings and greenfields. And the most vulnerable are unidentified, unlisted and unscheduled areas of significance.

A city planning model aimed at meeting housing needs without compromising heritage comes from Infrastructure New Zealand, who advocate an alternative: construct a new city. Coined Innovation City, it's a greenfield proposal on available land to the south of Auckland, accessible via the current main railway trunk line, a key to the success of the proposal.

“There's a large north-facing crescent of attractive and developable land that looks to the sea. So you would be looking at true innovation using great compact urban planning, designed to encourage as many people to live, work and play in that location. The long-term vision is to build something the size and scale of Hamilton which would grow to a Christchurch.”

The business approach provides Council with a sustainable financial model through the acquisition, rezoning and on-selling of land to developers.

The demand for housing is about placing people in homes. Few would argue the importance of this. But what about creating well functioning communities which embrace historic and cultural values?

“We need to ensure that growth is quality and that we end up with quality environments,” says Bill. “We can't just go: all right, we need to urgently house a whole bunch of people, and sacrifice quality and the environment.”

Sooner - but most likely later - the needs for housing will be met. The question is, how will we view the outcome twenty years from now?

End