This week the Auckland Council debated proposed changes to the unitary plan. Residents of the leafy Eastern Suburbs were up in arms at the prospect that more people were going to live there and their homes were going to be surrounded by huge apartment buildings full of immigrants.
Stirred on by their locally elected representatives and National Party stalwarts Desley Simpson and Cameron Brewer they decided to march on City Hall singing Kumbayah while they prepared to chain themselves to City Hall. They were going to refuse to leave until Auckland Council agreed to keep their suburbs exactly the way they are now.
They have a gripe. Sort of. Although some boorish treatment of young people who also spoke at the meeting made the Humans of Remuera look like dicks.
Obviously Auckland Council seriously undercooked its analysis. The draft Unitary Plan was not going to fit in as many houses as everyone agreed it should. But inner city intensification has been talked about for years from the Auckland Plan to the draft Unitary Plan. Fitting more people into a sparsely populated area should be a no brainer unless they want all the new arrivals to live in Henderson or Otahuhu. Maybe this is their desire. Intensification yes but not in my back yard.
It was a tough issue for the liberal councillors. Proper notice of the plan change should have been given but the compact city proposal is well advanced. Three story houses are hardly the end of civilisation as we know it.
The right block were loud and indignant. The left bloc were critical. The only councillors who voted to maintain the evidence were the Mayor and his remaining supporters and the Deputy Mayor and her remaining supporters.
Stephanie Rodgers calls the landowners position hypocritical.
She explains it more fully in this post.
The angry-making thing about the Epsom Paradox is it’s not hypocrisy. It’s pure cynicism. It’s the logical end behaviour of an ideology which believes the rich and powerful are inherently more deserving, more equal, more important than those people who live in “welfare suburbs”. The belief is not, “deregulation is good”; it’s “deregulation is good when it’s good for me.”
So when I want to build a set of leaky apartment buildings, sell them to unsuspecting people and then pull out of the shell company that holds all the liability, deregulation should let me do that. The market, after all, will somehow find a way to correct for massive issues which only become apparent years after I’ve made my profits and retired to a tropical island.
But when my next-door neighbour wants to put up a couple of townhouses on the back of their section, blocking MY view and meaning other people might be able to see into MY yard, well, that’s a travesty! An infringement on my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness! Don’t you know some of those people might be not rich?
The Government must be secretly pleased it has someone else to blame for Auckland’s housing woes. They are not worried where future housing supply comes from and are just as happy if it comes from urban sprawl or intensification. As long as the polls suggest that most people think the housing crisis is Auckland Council’s fault there is no problem.
They must have been in a really evil mood when they decided to schedule the final vote on the Unitary Plan in September this year, a month before election day. The Council is meant to receive absorb and vote on the plan within 20 working days. Based on this week’s experience the hysteria levels are going to be extreme. The prospects of politicking wrecking Auckland’s future blueprint must be really high.
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