Should have covered this earlier, Bernard Hickey from last Sunday:
Council caves before home owners
Auckland Council is reverting to the 2013 version of its Unitary Plan proposal, which will provide for just over 80,000 new homes by 2040.
This is despite expert working advice that it needed to come up with a set of zoning maps to produce 280,000 houses within the enlarged Auckland Council boundaries.
Think about this for a second.
The council decided it preferred zoning rules that would leave Auckland 200,000 houses short of what it needed to accommodate up to a million extra people over the next 30 years or so. This in a city that already has a shortage of 35,000-50,000 houses. …
Auckland is planning to fail.
It beggars belief that the governing body for New Zealand’s most economically and socially important city would fly in the face of pleas from those representing hundreds of thousands of today’s and tomorrow’s residents, ignore the Reserve Bank and the Productivity Commission and the ministers for housing and finance.
So why is Auckland in this mess?
Simply put, 700 residents from Kohimarama, Mission Bay and Glendowie held a meeting on February 9 to protest at the maps submitted in December, which they said proposed massive intensification in their suburbs.
They argued they had not been told about these changes, which they said was undemocratic. The meeting and the following publicity spooked councillors into opposing the more intense maps at this week’s meeting.
It demonstrated in vivid technicolour the concept of “Democratic Deficit”. This is where a few well-organised home-owners with the time and resources to lobby councillors stop development near them because these local politicians know older home owners vote at vastly higher rates than young renters.
Typical self-centered NIMBYism. “I’m alright so screw you”…
… the Council’s Youth Advisory Chair, Flora Apulu, spoke to the Council about how she felt the weight of the city’s half a million young people on her shoulders as she argued for the affordable housing they desperately needed from this “up-zoned” plan. She was jeered and heckled by the dozens of elderly and predominantly Pakeha homeowners sitting just metres behind her.
Sudhvir Singh from Generation Zero was jeered even more loudly when he said the generation of home-owners sitting behind him were “pulling up the ladder” of home ownership on the young of today. “Poor you”, was the response. Indeed. Poor us.
What do these greedy, entitled, sneering fools think is going to happen if they alienate, exclude and taunt the generations behind them?
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