34,000 new homes for Auckland

Amy Adams announced:

The Government today has announced a Crown land and building programme that will see tens of thousands of new houses built in Auckland over the next decade.

Social Housing Minister Amy Adams announced that the Government’s Crown Building Project will replace 8300 old, rundown houses in Auckland with 34,000 brand new purpose-built houses over 10 years. 24,300 of these will be built by Housing New Zealand through their Auckland Housing Programme.

Over the next ten years, the Crown Building Project will deliver around:

• 13,500 newly built social houses
• 20,600 new affordable and market homes.

“This is a significant undertaking for the Government, for taxpayers, and for our Social Housing reforms. It’s the equivalent of three and a half new houses on every street across Auckland,” Ms Adams says.

“These houses will be for our most vulnerable families, for first-home buyers, and for the wider market. We are building more social houses for Aucklanders and helping provide a pathway into independent, affordable housing.

“The Crown Building Project is the Government making the most out of the available residential land it owns to meet Auckland’s social housing needs.

“These 34,000 new houses are a substantial redevelopment and construction programme on a scale not seen since the 1950s.

This is a huge development and will basically see houses built on every piece of land available to the Government in Auckland.

It is a credible plan based on actual land available and building plans. Labour’s promise to build 100,000 houses in 10 years is a made up number not based on any actual assessment of land availability. As we saw in Lower Hutt they promised to build 400 homes on 1.7 hectares of land which is one home per 42 square metres!

In Auckland the reality is Labour has opposed almost every major new housing development. They fought against the Tamaki development and voted against the Point England development.

“Our plan to build 34,000 new homes over the next ten years has been carefully scoped and designed, is fully funded, and builders are on site getting on with the programme already.”

Anyone who claims they will do more than that needs to identify how they will build on land they don’t own.