Sage Eugenie: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13196. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I certainly agree with the Minister of Housing that Part 2 of the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Bill is the grunty part of the bill. That is because it deals with the planning process resource consents plan changes and variations for qualifying development in these special housing areas that have been identified by the Minister or by the Minister and the relevant council through the housing accord. I join with Holly Walker in expressing the Green Party’s appreciation for the Minister in the chair being active in that role and for taking a number of calls on the bill.But although the Minister is proud of the fact that this bill fast tracks consent processes and promises a 6-month time frame for greenfield developments and a 3-month one forbrownfields development that comes at quite a high cost. The costs are to local democracy—the cost of development not necessarily being well planned and integrated with the council’s district plans and the cost of reduced public participation and reduced appeal rights to the Environment Court. I would like to comment briefly on each of these issues.As Holly Walker also noted we have a crisis in terms of housing affordability but I do not believe we have a national emergency that justifies that ability of the executive through the Minister to override the decision-making powers of councils and to cut across how they have planned where development should occur through their district and city plans working with their communities. So we strongly object to the provisions in the bill that would remove territorial local authorities as the consent authority for these qualifying developments in special housing areas where there has not been an accord agreed and where the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has that role. We think that if we want sound planning that looks to the future—not just the next 3 years—we need to have councils retain their role in regulating land use and making decisions on these planning consents. The Minister and the bill are silent on how councils are going to have to deal with the extra costs of allowing development that is not well integrated with existing infrastructure.The problem that this part of the bill creates is that because the Minister and the Government are wanting to speed up decision making the bill is ostensibly establishing an alternative planning regime to what exists in the Resource Management Act. Although it takes ingredients of the Resource Management Act it also changes some of the criteria for making decisions that would exist under the Resource Management Act and the processes for making those decisions. As a number of submitters on the bill said creating this alternative system may result in unnecessary duplication and costs. There is also a very real risk that it will lead to decisions around the location the scale and the design of new subdivisions and new residential developments that have not been anticipated planned for and agreed to by the local community in conjunction with their council as would normally occur through the district plan process.When you read through Part 2 and you try to consider how the provisions here work how the ones in the Resource Management Act work and how they mesh it is very complicated. So you would certainly need to be a planner or a lawyer to understand them. But my particular concern in terms of this lack of meshing with council plans is in clause 14 which is in Part 1. Those criteria there for special housing areas are very narrow because they do not include factors such as the proximity of the area where special housing developments are going to occur to existing retail employment and social services. They do not include proximity to public transport and they do not include any relationship to urban design so that we get good-quality development. Certainly the Social Services Committee has included an extra provision around infrastructure but the whole issue of where development is located has a major impact on what our communities look like and the whole built form.So where there is a reliance on the market and on a private developer coming to the council and saying that it wants to do a plan change and to have fewer planning constraints applying you potentially get situations as happened in Northwood in Christchurch where you get roads in the subdivision that are too narrow to accommodate buses easily. So that is not sound development and it is the sort of speedy development that the bill promotes at the cost of sound development.The bill is also going to encourage sporadic ad hoc development because of clause 32. That outlines the matters that a decision maker must take into account when assessing a qualifying development. The problem here is that the matters are ranked and the bill’s purpose of housing affordability is ranked first. So that means that decision makers must give greater weight to housing affordability and promoting that than to the usual matters in the Resource Management Act. As the Hamilton City Council said: “This in effect raises and prioritises undefined residential development as being of greater significance than other forms of development in New Zealand and undermines the intent and effectiveness of the RMA 1991 and consent authorities ability to make informed balanced and sensible decision on development matters.”The last matter that I want to comment about is the other cost of fast tracking which is the reduced ability for the public and councils to participate in the planning process. That is because my understanding of the provisions in Supplementary Order Paper 351 and the bill itself is that they are going to provide a form of limited notification where the decision maker has to consult the local authority the adjacent landowners any infrastructure providers and anybody who has authorised a designation. But if those parties are consulted and agree there is no need for it to go out to the public for submissions. So that means that if this is not consistent with a plan the public does not get a right to say: “Well we do not like this because it is going to allow development in an area where we would prefer to see it provided as open space for example or where we think it has impacts on amenity or landscape issues.”We want compact liveable cities where people can connect with each other and with good public transport. If we get ad hoc sporadic development we are not going to get the good planning that you would normally get through city and district plans and metropolitan urban limits. If we have development occurring outside of those urban limits it is a recipe for sprawl. It may be more affordable because land prices are cheaper but it is not affordable to the people who live in those houses because they will have much higher transport costs. That is what we have seen in Melbourne where a lot of the houses further out are not selling. There has been a glut of them. They are not affordable for the people who live in them because of the very high transport costs. So we need integrated development and this bill does not promote that.