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Posted Aug 24, 2026, 6:10 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: East Vancouver (No longer across the ocean!)
Posts: 3,775
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Didn't want to think of a better place to put this, but wow hard to believe this could possibly have worked. 
Auckland guide to housing affordability and soft urban renewal:
Step one: Amalgamate the disjointed municipalities with different plans into one city
Step two: Rezone 75% of all land for townhouses
Step three: That's it, there is no step three. Maybe go fuck yourself Patrick Condon can be step three.
Quote:
How New Zealand’s biggest city solved its housing crisis
Rezoning has changed the face of Auckland though critics warn lessons hard to replicate
A decade ago, New Zealand’s biggest city was in the grip of a housing crisis. Immigration had jumped on the back of a buoyant economy and New Zealanders returning from Sydney and London were joined by Chinese and Indian migrants looking for work and a place to live.
For planners in Auckland, situated on a narrow strip of land pinched between two harbours, the answer was to look up.
The city, whose population has risen from 1.3mn in 2010 to 1.8mn in 2025, has in the past decade rezoned 75 per cent of its residential land, allowing single-storey family homes with lawns and garages to be replaced by taller, narrower, terraced town houses.
In many parts of the world, including big European and American cities, young people are struggling to get on the property ladder and working families complain of unaffordability. Some are asking whether Auckland offers a model that can be replicated in other cities.
“Urban economists [around the world] have analysed the outcomes and found it successful in increasing the number of homes,” said Nicole Bennetts, head of policy at the Planning Institute of Australia.
The rezoning has changed the face of Auckland, an attractive city with bustling harbours and regular ferries to islands with some of New Zealand’s finest beaches and vineyards, making it denser and — in the words of some — feel more of a city.
“There’s now 14 town houses where there was one big house,” said Graham Wall, an estate agent in the city. “People are pretty good with that and the cafés are full.”
Most importantly, “you don’t hear the word shortage any more”, said Kelvin Davidson, chief economist at Cotality, a property data company.
A potential 1.2mn new dwellings were envisaged under the so-called Auckland Unitary Plan.
“The directive was to grow more compactly and the only way to go was up,” said Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy, associate professor of economics at the University of Auckland.
The massive development was only made possible by the merger of eight local governing bodies in 2010, said Gary Blick, chief economist of Auckland Council, allowing greater unity of thought and direction.
The real lesson for other cities from Auckland was how a “patchwork quilt of plans” could be consolidated into a long-term vision, said Bennetts at the Planning Institute of Australia.
The plan, which concentrated development within a 14km radius of the city centre, chimed with Auckland’s changing demographics. Older people wanted to downsize without leaving the city, Blick said, while younger people, who had often lived overseas and were familiar with a greater variety of accommodation, wanted smaller and cheaper housing.
“People were willing to forgo a bit of land to live somewhere desirable. Demand has been proven,” he said of the rise of town houses or terraced housing.
After an intense building flurry, Auckland’s housing stock is now 618,849 units, which is 101,000 more than a decade ago, equating to a 19.5 per cent rise, according to a 2025 policy paper by Greenaway-McGrevy, James Allan Jones and Chris Crow.
Meanwhile Auckland house prices, with a median value of just over NZ$1mn (US$587,000), have lost a quarter of their value in that timeframe. That is slightly more than the nationwide drop. Lower prices can help people enter the property market, though some caution that in Auckland dozens of identical properties remain unsold.
Rental prices in other cities on the North Island rose as much as 23 per cent more than Auckland between 2016 and 2024, according to calculations from Greenaway-McGrevy, writing this year with Yun So.
There is much about the Auckland experience that is hard to replicate, analysts say, not least because of its lack of historical development, which meant it was a blank template compared with already densely developed cities such as Sydney.
The post-2016 building boom might just have been authorities being forced to catch up with demand, said independent economist Tim Helm, referring to what he called the “myth” of the Auckland Unitary Plan.
“It is far from clear that the post-2016 building boom was caused by the policy itself. It may instead reflect a stretched housing market catching up with rapid population growth,” Helm said.
The rapid transformation of some suburbs has not come without pain. Residents complain about congestion and the prospect of 11-metre-high houses being built right up to their fence line.
Some residents in West Auckland complain that relentless construction noise and disruption have made some suburbs almost unlivable. Developers have offered premium rates to buy out blocks in order to demolish houses to build dozens of new buildings.
Many, in the city’s leafier suburbs, remain concerned about greater height and density as the plan is expanded. “All my neighbours are terrified,” said Wall.
More development, including high-rise blocks around transport corridors, is now planned — expanding the number of potential new dwellings from 1.2mn to between 1.4mn and 1.6mn.
Still, the pace of transformation is remarkable.
People who visited Auckland a decade ago would take a taxi from the airport into the city that would wind through the back streets of unremarkable suburbs dotted with single story standalone houses that dated to another era.
“It would be the first thing a tourist would see,” said Davidson. “It didn’t feel like a great advertisement for our country.”
He added: “Now those roads are full of shiny new town houses which in my view look better. It’s subjective but housing stock needs to be rejuvenated and redesigned. It all makes good sense.”
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https://www.ft.com/content/ec25a937-3dbd-417c-82a1-db223b62cca6?syn-25a6b1a6=1
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