Hearings for Christchurch City Council’s Plan Changes 13 & 14 are starting next week. As such, I thought I’d write a recap of what this is all about. Some of you expert readers out there will know all this already, but I’m pretty a sure a lot of you won’t as well so hopefully this quick summary is helpful.
If you cast your minds back to October 2020 and look at the picture below, you’ll immediately get flashbacks of covid lockdowns, Jacinda Ardern’s daily 1pm briefings, and Judith Collins leading the National party.
And if you look a the graph below you can add skyrocketing house prices to the list.
A lot has changed in the last three years!
That day, Labour and National combined their powers in a rare bipartisan announcement to have a crack at fixing the housing crisis. They did it by announcing this ridiculously boring looking policy document (they didn’t even put a nice picture on the cover!):
Boring to look at but absolute dynamite inside. It’s not particularly long, but packs some killer punches and is considered world-leading in many ways.
At its heart it takes a whole lot of regulatory powers off councils, forcing them to instead let the market go about building housing unhindered. Somewhat unexpectedly this was driven to a large extent by our most left-wing party (Greens) and opposed by the ones who I thought were meant to be the most libertarian (Act).
Firstly it required most councils around the country to remove minimum parking requirements, and instead just let people choose for themselves how much carparking they want at their home. This may seem like a small change but it has huge impacts on urban form and housing affordability. This was implemented in Christchurch in February 2022.
Secondly it required councils to allow more housing in and around all our major activity centres. In these locations council had to remove any restrictions on people wanting to build high density residential:
Next, the government decided to take it a step further. A year after the document above was released, the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Act was passed. Another horrendously inaccessible sounding name, but something that will have very tangible impacts on the ground. It required the Councils in our biggest cities to remove any restrictions on allowing people to build three story homes if they want to, in most locations. There were lots of nuances around things like setbacks and recession planes, but that’s the basic gist of it.
If you put this together with the National Policy Statement and apply it to Christchurch you get this sort of zoning (here):
With this zoning, people can build up to 90m in the city centre, 14-32m in and around most of our centres, and up to 12m just about everywhere else.
To caveat this though, there was recognition that there will be some areas where it genuinely is a bad idea to allow this development, and so some allowance was made for councils to restrict development in specific areas for certain reasons. Legitimate reasons are listed below.
Note how they are all quite specific except for the last one. CCC have proposed a bunch of qualifying matters (35-odd by my count) covering a whole range of different reasons .
A few things about this plan change that I think are particularly interesting are:
- Sydenham is changing from industrial to mixed use – this will be a space to watch over the next few years.
- The City Centre will allow 90m buildings again – keen to see if any developers want to take up the challenge and add to our two towers.
- It will take a few years but I’m really keen to see the longer-term impacts of all this on housing affordability, public transport use in the city, emissions etc.
Note that the maps above are all based on the Plan Change as it was publicly notified back in March 2023. Over the last 6 months the thinking has changed in some of these areas (in response to submissions recieved) and over the course of the hearings they’ll no doubt change again, so keep in mind the final adopted version will look a bit different to the maps above.
Lastly, I can’t not mention the election. National have said that if they get in, they’ll make the medium density residential stuff optional, provided you have zoned land for 30 years’ worth of housing (which I understand Christchurch has). As far as I can tell they don’t mention the high density parts so I assume that means they’d keep that bit.
Let the hearings roll on. I’m not sure if they are open to the public or not but either way they will be livestreamed if any one wants to watch (warning – they go for 4 months). I don’t have a link but keep an eye on the official hearings website and it will appear there when ready.
TALKING TRANSPORT 