Len’s plan won’t work

Anne Gibson at NZ Herald reports:

Auckland could need an extra 20,000ha to accommodate new houses in the next three decades if its current style of new housing is to continue.

That’s an area around 14 kms wide by 14 kms long.

Martin Udale, ex-chief executive of McConnell Property, was commissioned by Ree Andersen, Auckland Council’s regional strategy manager, to write an independent review of a report by Studio D4’s Patrick Fontein and architects Jasmax on the controversial plan to ring-fence 75 per cent of all new housing within existing city limits in the next 30 years. …

Udale, of Essentia Consulting Group, also questioned the wisdom behind the plan and raised the prospect of just 15 new houses built on each hectare of land, many small-lot suburban housing and townhouses, and showed how the city would need an extra 20,000ha.

But if 25 houses were built on a hectare and terrace-style residences were a big part of the mix, 12,000ha of land was needed. If 100 dwellings were built on each hectare, just 3000ha of extra land would be needed, he calculated.

100 dwellings per hectare? Shudder.

I just don’t think you can fit an extra 300,000 people within the existing Auckland metro area.

Yet the Auckland plan proposed that two-thirds of all new housing development would be low-rise in the form of attached dwellings and low-rise apartments of four storeys or less.

So Udale posed the question of where all the extra land would come from and calculated that an area about half to two-thirds the current area of the Auckland isthmus could be needed.

So it seems the only way Len’s plan will work is if people all go into high-rise apartments.