Serious Suggestions to Abolish Councils

I've been a council abolitionist for a while - before it was cool - but now it's picking up steam across the political spectrum.  

A learned post by Gwynn Compton, a former councilor, called a particular suggestion to abolish councils "libertarian brain rot" (see his good piece at https://localaotearoa.substack.com/p/calls-to-shut-down-local-government). There are many bad reasons for good ideas. There are many bad ways of implementing good ideas. But, better things are possible, and we might even try to do good things well.

So, I suggest that we abolish certain core features of New Zealand's local government, and provide a menu for proposals to replace these features. I start with those, before providing a contentious summary of what councils do, and why they don't always work. Then I give a quick argument, ending on a high note, on why councils suck and why being on a council sucks.

The core issues with councils, as I see it, is they're not terribly politically transparent (they're hard to follow, and hard to care about), cost effective (due to a mix of weird scale, bad incentives, and procedural obligations), and not always good at doing things at any price (because councilors, constituents and council staff and consultants sometimes have dumb ideas, or do ideas of any kind badly). Their participatory, localist design doesn't map onto the real world closely, and they don't achieve things in the real world - with real world constraints - all that well. 

Core Features of Local Government that should go
The following core features are the current features of our local government system that we should abolish (and, in summary, why):
1) Having locally elected councilors (especially when the job sucks, as outlined below, and can't readily attract much talent);
2) Central government divesting the more dull delivery tasks, and more contentious hyper-local decisions, without much money, onto local councils (if the Government wants it done, it could just do it, or contract for it, and be politically responsible for this);
3) Big infrastructure decision-making sitting with local councils (whose political incentives are largely to serve landed gentry with low rates);
4) Local planning and building decisions and disputes being decided, in the first and sometimes second instance, by local councils (who face a range of legal challenges and liability for these functions, which largely, and increasingly, are bound by national secondary legislation);
5) Brutal procedural/participatory and judicial constraints on council decisions (which central government does not face, because it knows this is super dumb); and
6) Cities having fewer and bigger councils that still exist, rural areas having many and small councils.

Proposals for Replacement Models  

 I proposal the following replacements design choices to improve on the local government status quo by a) doing good things; b) being politically transparent; and c) being cost-efficient and economically-rational:
1) No elected councilors, but twice as many MPs, leaving an abundance for constituency work, and with local commissioners in each region.
2) Government gorging itself on most of the dry and controversial stuff, in the Department of Plumbing, Planning and Parks. You can leave a handful of grants, prizegivings, and library opening hours to a handful of mayors and do-gooders. Potentially, they should be picked by lottery from an approved list.
3) A handful of local corporations minding particular institutions or services, funded by a mix of targeted rates and user fees, ratified by local votes. I don’t know if I fully buy this, but Eric Crampton seems keen, and local user-pays stuff formed after hyper local referenda honestly might be less bad.  
4) Centrally prescribed plans, building regulations and consents, drafted and applied by a national planning and construction commission. The commission can draft plans and building regulations, for the Minister's sign-off, process applications and spit them out.
5) Relying on political constitutionalism (i.e, people voting in elections) at the central Government level, over procedural input (i.e, people with enough free time to be mad before a decision is made) or judicial challenge (i.e, Decile 10 suburbanites and central city business owners with carparks judicially-reviewing generally sensible rules) to incentivize good local plans, policies and service delivery.
6) Local councils, if remaining at all all, that cover entire labour market agglomerations. The provinces (which don't urban labour markets) can have governors they despise "from Wellington", who act as commissioners for the government of the day to ensure local infrastructure is run down only slowly, and primary industries and tourism can keep functioning (while being personally despised as a helpful shield for the Government). This is in tension with 1) and 2), but it's part of the same general menu.  

What does my set of proposals tend to change, and what does it tend to preserve?  
It keeps local service delivery for local services. 

It limits local elections, but in a way which preserves political accountability and decision-making through different means.

It moves the big stuff to central government in a transparent way, which controls it through money and national policy direction anyway.  

It creates more roles sensible people with ambition and talent might want. It aligns incentives with democratic government in a Westminster system generally.  

It proposes other ways of doing some really dry but important things, as well as keeping the hyper-local feel good tasks that councils don't really do. 

Basic things about New Zealand councils  
Councils are basically local authorities—city councils (WCC), district councils (...not sure what these are, appear to be outside of cities, so they're presumably for farmers), and unitary authorities that also do regional council things (such as Auckland Council and of all places Nelson City Council). These have elected councilors (by FPP or STV in postal elections), who make policies, plans, and bylaws, which are implemented and applied by the council executive (run by the council chief executive). There's a mayor with unclear authority who is directly elected and therefore may have no particular sway whatsoever.  

What people think councils do is, like, libraries and community group funding. This is pretty marginal given cost constraints. Half their jobs are very dry (rubbish collection, getting yelled at over carparking), half are increasingly difficult, expensive, and controversial (massive building and infrastructure plans generally, water infrastructure specifically, and a ton of plan-making - or stopping plan-making - to keep up with planning and environmental law reforms).  They sign off on buildings and get sued over it because they're required to be building consent authorities. 

They raise money through 'rates' on the value of land and/or its capital improvements, have a mechanism for borrowing money, can charge a range of user fees, and are generally unpopular when they do any of these things. They are also unpopular if they cut anything.

They vary wildly in size. Some of the smaller ones are shitshows. Worse than the more well known large ones, which are also to some extent shitshows. 

I won't focus on regional councils, because they look like they’ll get abolished—they largely do some environmental regulation that looks like it’ll be turned into a central government function. They also have some public transport responsibilities, but most of our cities with any public transport will probably have a single, agglomerated city council with NZTA micromanagement anyway.

Basic issues with councils  
They're too big and too small.  

Too big to be all that responsive to communities which exist in particular suburbs and towns. Most councilors anywhere big represent a small subarea. And unlike the rather general rules and range of spending in Parliament, council spending proposals are hyper local. Which would be ok, but everyone solely wants to do stuff for their area. Getting consensus on what to pay for or cut is a nightmare. See the Wellington City Council, where the ruling bloc of pro-spending, pro-highish-rates progressives had to make hard calls on cutting because all the hyper-local conservatives were anti-spending elsewhere and pro-spending on their suburbs and dumb pet projects.  

But they're too small, they can easily externalise a ton of costs. So, of course they do. Wellington councilors didn’t care about its housing crisis. That largely becomes the other councils in the region’s fault, as the desirable core becomes uni students, yuppies, and rich people.  

When I lived in Lower Hutt, for most purposes the regional council that ran trains and buses, and the Wellington City Council that ran the places I drank, cracked-down on bottomless brunches and went to in my free time mattered much more to me than the Hutt City Council. The boundaries were nonsense - too big to represent particular communities; too small to actually reflect the size, and interconnection of cities. And the Hutt City Council was if anything unusually competent (this was early on in its post upzoning building boom, pulling in the senior advisors that Wellington City was pushing out through high housing costs).

But neither agglomeration nor disintegration can solve some other key issues around their funding, autonomy and design. 

They're tending to have their funding constrained. The Nats are annoyed that rates are spiking, which they are because they were unduly low for far too long.  They will deal with this by imposing, or posturing that they will impose, rates caps and so constrain funding more. This is not a particularly brilliant idea. 

Councils are increasingly service-delivery wings of government. Central Government has realised it is actually meant to set National Policy Statements and the like under the Resource Management Act, tightly controlling councils' powers. Government has become the dominant figure on transport and other issues, generally through funding. 

Councils also, crucially, legally limited-scope yet still quite general-purpose bodies. They cover a ton of area but rarely dominate the field. Local authorities don't even control public transport, even though people think they do. They get blamed for stuff they don't control, but have influence in a range of fields. It is an unpleasant job share situation at best, and doomed set of powers and incentives at worse. 

Also, NZ is a city-state with a hinterland. It’s Auckland, a few mid-size cities and towns, and a few primary industries and tourist spots around low-density rural areas.  

Being a councilor sucks, councils suck  
Just today, I was Directly Messaging (on X, the Everything App - formerly known as Twitter) a very qualified and sharp poster, who was being nagged into running for an important seat on an important city's city council by a locally popular party. She advised that she’d rather kill herself. And the opportunity cost for this poster of entering local politics was unusually low. 

Being a councilor is an awful job, with limited autonomy, no real progression, often awful colleagues. You are high-enough profile to get abused, but not to get ahead in life. It’s amazing we get as many good councilors as we do. There are, perhaps, only a slight majority of meh to awful councilors. Most major councils even have a handful of competent people that do the work (I'm told its perhaps 7 out of 25 on Auckland Council). This is surprising. It is a bad gig that repels talented people who care about their cities or districts. 

The average mid-career professional, in a bigger entity and with less profile, can be better paid and achieve a fair bit more autonomy—with better outcomes. This likely avoids abuse from the public, dealing with the geriatric sleazes and morons polluting our councils, and mind-numbingly long meetings and reports. 

The current format of local councils, with elected representatives, is in some sense dependent on elected representatives being baseline competent and supported by constituents. The competence point is not universally the case, as outlined above, and honestly it is the case more often than you'd expect. But the number of uncontested seats - I think read there were 5 in Hutt City - is pretty high. People don't really want to do it. Turnout is dogshit - people don't even want to vote. They don't even want to know. 

So, we should abolish councils. 

The case for anything but 'character areas'

There isn't a plausible way of using policy reasoning to justify our approach to character areas.

Right now, in council plans, planners colour in a few titles as having significant levels of 'character' and those have special character restrictions. Let's call this 'character zoning', because that explains the procedure and legal effect.

The policy process starts with an inkling of a policy problem. From here, you try get some clarity on what exactly you are trying to do. This is an iterative exercise of defining the policy problem. Problem definition is a big deal, because you try present your final recommendation as a way of addressing the problem in an obvious and helpful way.

So, let's try come up with a policy problem that might plausibly lead to current character zoning.

Maybe "pretty old houses in rich old neighborhoods are being bought and built-up"? That's what people actually care about, so it is an obvious place to start. Unfortunately this won't take us very far. This broad problem would mean "ban selling". All the issues come spilling out. You'd get asked "can we justify limits on private property rights", "who gives a fuck lol. lmao even", "this seems comically overbroad". Well, one of those is a question, the other two are the appropriate responses. Not auspicious, but let's keep going.

So, as you go along you'll try make it a bit more nuanced because you're not getting buy-in on something this dumb.

What about "there are communities with strong views on what buildings should look like and how nice the streets should be". This doesn't get you very far either, because they then go "well why are they selling if they care so much?" and "is there any data on if changing these buildings affects how nice the streets are" and "are there alternative ways of having nice streets and nice buildings? The answers being roughly, "uh like they are really just cynical bastards that hate new builds until they want to downsize to Waiheke or Greytown and sell to a developer for top dollar", "god no this isn't even vibes, let alone empirical" and "of course there are better ways of having nice streets and nice buildings and you wouldn't use any tool we have authority over to achieve them".

At this point you're just going to go along and start generating some options and hope you can backfill a decent problem definition later on, because your political masters want an outcome and you don't think there's a good way of getting there.

So, what are the types of options you might be coming up with?

Well, you might look to history as a guide for how to get such neighbourhoods. So you might encourage people using cheap prefabs, not having setbacks, not having carparks and all the other things that people actually did to build 'character streets'. This could permit a ton of new streets built in the old way. Might help if the sections were shallow and on a grid, not on cul de sacs like modern McMansions and not deep like sausage flat sites. Maybe there's a way to get nicer street design? 

 None of this engages all that closely with zoning. it is more like giving planners and subdividers guidance to make more walkable, less car centric, streets with more narrow and long and less thin and deep sections. Maybe there's some incentive you can give, or a niche planning rule or two you can change? Maybe planner guidance is all you need, that's pretty cheap and easy to implement. Ah fuck this is nothing like character zoning.

Well shit, something else? Maybe design guides, even prescriptive design rules? These have some merit, in that they're relatively low cost and plausible as an intervention on their face. Oh wait, in the UK there are many prescriptive design guides. Andso many NIMBYs. From New Zealand I hear the rage and hate and whinging low quality subdivisions. But these subdivisions are usually built from brick or masonry, which we view as pretty. In New Zealand, such places would be viewed as overqualified for 'character'. And the UK has abysmal build rates.

Is there anything happening now without any intervention? People love Brookfields, who built wood neo-Georgian ordinary townhouses: some terraces, the odd flat, a fair few sausage flats and setback things which are not authentic Georgian street design but whatever, they're just bland boxes with certain facade elements that fit in our current street designs. That is basically what people want right? So we could just let the free market run wild and see if people buy nicer buildings.

Maybe we could do a mixed model, where we have design guides, remove unhelpful rules in plans and policies that make buildings more ugly, put effort into street design, avoid the car-centric design. None of this requires putting all that much into plans about 'zones' or 'limits'. Its more about facilitating some good options, having some moderate nudges in the right direction and maybe pushing councils to do a few things better.

We could also have an incentive scheme. Could every council have a 'character targeted rate', used to impose costs on lower amenity areas and encourage them to do better. The funds could be spent on urban regeneration with better street designs or higher amenity. Or we could burn the money. 

Oh and we better chuck the political master's preferred option in there too. As this is the status quo, we will put all the options in a table but give options pluses and minuses depending on if they are better or worse than current character zoning on the criteria.

Time for options analysis
If we are going to work out what option to recommend, we need some criteria. We might try backfill some here too to get to the right proposal, but this is getting tough. Character zoning isn't hitting most of the policy pleasure spots.

What about the economic impacts? Urban economics is very big on the benefit of agglomeration: economic outcomes being markedly improved by concentrations of stuff in key locations. Character zoning generally afflicts inner suburbs in important suburbs. So, is it worth tanking agglomeration city-wide for character zones? The areas we pick for character zoning significantly change the calculus.

What about the costs imposed on others? In addition to stunting economic growth, this reduces the choices and increases the costs of  everyone in the city on where to buy or rent housing. It also impacts the potential for local commerce in those areas. 

Is it low cost to apply? No, it is a huge faff. Character analyses aren't free, enforcing the rules isn't free, litigating to force landowners to not build or do stuff isn't free.

Does the option achieve the policy intent? Well, character zones certainly keep areas the same. The facades at least. But they're rather narrow and there's a high cost to get there. 

Whereas the other options look a bit better. They're probably cheaper, permit relatively better economic impacts, hit others less, might well address the policy better and, crucially, scale to other and new areas. A character rate imposes costs, but it also provides incentives for better design if that is a way to avoid the rate. What is the incentive structure of character zoning?

So, character zoning is not coming out looking good. 

Least Bad Character Zoning
Now, this does point to places where character zoning makes the most sense. It might be worth putting character stuff there for places - probably touristy, commuter-y or retiree-y - which are small, not intended to grow but also have some other convenient spaces near a central hub. And if we had something more like a design guide to influence development rather than a rigid veto.

So, we've landed on the easiest way, and best place, of having justifiable character zones. Not in the middle of cities, but the middle of tourist and satellite towns. Not even the growing ones, but ones that have space to if grow if they can. They have to have 'being a nice small quaint place' as a core part of their character. This is the least harmful - indeed, maybe beneficial - place to put character zones. But this is extremely conditional, because the rules around character zoning are just like the things that brought us the housing crisis generally. 

In practical terms, if we zone half of Greytown as 'cute character vibes DO NOT CHANGE', we should probably upzone the other half (not a side where there's flooding). This means we can have a nice main area for people to visit and wander around in, which is the most exciting thing to do in Greytown. But this also leaves a bunch of space place with huge zoned capacity for people to live in. Paris, incidentally, has an inner core of the Hausmann rebuilt areas, but then high-rise apartments for commuters a bit further out.

Worst case character zoning is what we're doing now

The worst case for character zoning is basically what boomer journalists and freelance whingers advocate for. Take high amenity, low density suburbs and insist nothing is ever built there. Impose character zoning. Make it obnoxious. Insist that upzoning mandates have flexibility to permit character zoning, not the other way around. And insist that new housing is pushed outwards not upwards, no matter how central, high amenity, high demand and well supported by infrastructure, schools, and so on the suburb is.  

How to get character with "character zoning"
But we do have some options to bring 'character' vibes to cities if we want to. We can improve street design and section layout, encourage or at least facilitate houses . Most of the ways we do this are starkly inconsistent with how current character rules work, and also with what character protestors and judicial review applicants talk about.

So, the end result of trying to rig a policy process to favour character zoning in roughly its current form is that we should go hard in the urbanist paint.

So, what should we do

There isn't a good policy case for character zoning. But there are other things we can do to make more places - most places in cities even - be nicer and have good urban character. Cities are super fun and cool, and we should prioritize making living in a city way more fun and cool.

Location matters. The exact suburbs that should be full of apartments are full of villas, and that's a problem. They have central locations, high amenity, good transport links, nice hubs. The exact areas that we should be building in are the exact places we ban it. It's rich whingy fuckers hogging the good stuff. Character zoning is the reverse of what we should do with the luxury of good locations.

We should want nicer cities. That means doubling down on urbanist policies that lead to better design, as well as pro-housing policies to put more houses in the areas that are already nice. The latter is easier, the former is harder (for me anyway). 

We should insist on building things - up not just out; in nice places, not just doing a wee bit of greenfield development or in poorer urban places; near where we already have trains, pipes and schools and not just where we'd need new ones, as the old ones are underused. 

Where are we now?

We are partway through ending a set of terrible policies for cities, for economies, for people. A lot of the policies came from the mid 20th century desire to make cities nicer for people. But, over time, as this developed, as we've interrogated what was going on, it emerges that we let some really dumb stuff happen. 

We are accepting something fucking moronic because it is a status quo which benefits a handful of the most obnoxious, most obsessive, most time-rich and most selfish shitheads around. And its only going away because a handful of us obsessive policy, urban economics, transport and other assorted urban nerds are chucking pro-housing proposals to ministers; normies are sick of the cost, quality and location of housing; and politicians are appalled at the economic and direct fiscal costs of the housing crisis. 

A few people, even a few YIMBYs, make earnest suggestions that it is worth compromising with character nerds and other anti-housing groups in nice suburbs. The time for that has passed. There's not a good policy case for concessions. The crisis is too great, and we are going to have to campaign against them anyway.

If we want more and better housing, with better design on prettier streets, let's do that directly. And let's start with the nice suburbs in the centres of our cities, by stacking twelve storeys of apartments on top of a bar opposite a supermarket, four minutes from a train station. Let's build cities for people that like cities. 

People that like a quiet village vibe can fucking move to one.

 

PS: This hasn't touched on heritage at all, because unlike the common or garden character/heritage battler I am not conflating the two. My view on heritage is that the state should have a list, it should own everything on that list, and everything else is fair game. How many private owners are there that would tear a nice old place down, when tearing that down would be a matter of public concern?

Selling a New Story for the Left on Housing

The last Labour government did some great stuff on housing, and almost no one rated it. Kiwibuild (objectively not a big deal) overpromised and was undercooked;  KO did a lot of state house building (which is unpopular and expensive) but maybe less well at its urban development side (with broader benefits and without inevitably, endlessly burning money). Conversely, the NPS-UD went under the radar (the base doesn't really froth 'centralised command for market liberalisation' as you might hope), while the MDRS was killed without particular public outcry. Housing costs still suck, people whinge that the new townhouses are poorly designed, and a million more people hate KO (and its tenants) than live in their houses.

So, the left could do a bit better on housing policy and a lot better on housing politics. So, what is to be done? First, we should understand the tools for influencing discourse in politics and policy. Secondly, we should understand the story we are going up against. Thirdly, we should come up with something better.

Stories, slogans and snippets
What can progressives and liberals do to make better things possible? They can make a pitch on housing that tickles dumb guy brain but fits with smart guy brain.

If housing stuff was up and going well, then the left wouldn't really need a housing story. Building and planning would have mid level ministers that quietly nerd out or at least take practical advice without too much money or political risk being attached. Hansard would have the odd debate on a bill passed with bipartisan support, with endless thanks to the hard work of the select committee and good input from across the House. That is how incrental reforms with broad support work.

But housing is still buggered. So, the left needs to both be good on housing, and have a popular and distinct story. It is partisan - the end of the MDRS proves that. So, the pitch must be good on policy substance, but also good for political shitshows.

I'm going to try turn some snippets of policy together with slogans and the outline of a story. Politicians love slogans and people love stories. Your wonks, surrogates and intermediaries should be able to spam your snippets at any opportunity. "Build more houses" and "transit oriented development" and "tax land" get buy in from the nerds and from partisans who just want an easy dunk. My suggestions will be a bit more granular, given the good high level ones are taken.

The right wing story on housing in NZ
The right has had a pretty simple story on housing for 20-odd years. The RMA (and plans thereunder) are too restrictive. We need to liberalize land markets to build up (and mostly) out. Don Brash thought this; Key and English thought this; Bishop thinks this and Luxon might think this if he thinks about property other than his capital gains. The contemporary, nuanced right view builds on the laissez faire simple story with two other slogans: give councils a right to plan and manage growth (reassuring incumbent landowners in rich suburbs the growth won't be near them), and that we need growth to pay for growth (assuring incumbent landowners in rich suburbs that they won't need to pay councils anything either). In practical terms, this is the view that we should go for US style "tall and sprawl" development three complementary ways.

I'm reasonably sceptical of the right's story, although there are more and less attractive ways to run it. Bish is keen for extreme intensification around transit nodes in Auckland isthmus, which I like. Partly because I like it, it does strike me as one of the many hot takes in his speeches that land better with Twitter urbanists than Cabinet. 

Right now, I don't have that much hope for the right's story. Are we going to get any actual mid-density when a coalition partner and PM are zealous opponents of townhouses everywhere? This is damning, when NZ's only housing successes, bluntly, have been townhouse spam. There's even less hope for high-density in most high-demand areas - probably the biggest gap in NZ's housing market. The dumb greenfield subsidies and fast track subdivisions favour big National donating developers, over the influx of smaller firms building townhouses and other infill in upzoned areas. Add in some roads with such bad BCR you'd have to snort petrol to fund, and the right's story comes rather close to advocating Tauranga as a model. We may find out the hard way if sensible infrastructure pricing blunts the edges.

The right's story doesn't work because their factions disagree. Right wing liberals and libertarians want a radical, enabling change to land-use rules; the conservatives and gentry want even more obnoxious stagnation and NIMBYism. The main tension is in inner suburbs and commuter towns. Both hotbeds of entrenched right wing centers want to keep hogging land, location, amenities and infrastructure without wanting growth or to pay for anything. The bandaid is to permit more greenfield developers, and the odd industrial interest, to build and to keep vetoing everything else. And this is exactly where the real opportunities lie for the left.
 

Pitching Pro-Housing Policy and Politics for Progressives 

There is a ton of work to do on housing and urban issues, even with the real inroads on underlying issues around restrictive planning. This requires both focus on the big issues, and a pretty broad platform. Obviously, everyone should just quote Mega Auckland 2050 and my 2000 word, 20 view blogs on retooling KO. But here's what a more full and focused platform might look like:

• Building Good Vibes: Addressing Design and Defects
• The quality of housing is dire: houses are often poorly designed and poorly built. 
• We should encourage well-designed houses with reassuring and viable defect warranties, not by bringing back planning restrictions.
• Constantly on the Move: Building More Transport, Near More People, More Often
• Our housing is too often car-dependent greenfield, or infill far from good transport links. 
• We should prioritize building for people and communities near transport links, and transport links by people and their communities.
• Using What We've Got Better
• We've got limits on infrastructure and limits on funding and financing infrastructure. 
• We should use what we've got better, with user-pays pricing and also charges on low-density areas (reflecting their surplus infra or the high cost of new low infra for low density areas) to encourage sensible levels of development and fund more infrastructure where people live.
• Rich pricks in stagnant suburbs or satellite towns should pay their way.
• Better, Faster, Stronger: Fast Track for the Right Reasons by the Right People
• Central government should fast track with high caliber panels and specialists at agencies working on government priority areas to bring speed thorough additional expertise, more than corner cutting. This is how you can sidestep bad councils and build good things like new offices on K Road.
• Public Places as Nice Spaces
• We should let our planners focus on nice opulent public buildings and shared spaces, and stop them micromanaging private spaces which people can and should tinker with themselves.

This sets substantive goals and directions for pro-housing progressive policy. A lot of people, who are on the left, care a lot about RMA process, community input, and dumb restrictive shit in plans. I don't think this lands with many (most?) left wingers. It is better to focus on more good stuff, more quickly. We can think about process as a way to achieve substance; let's not start with a procedure and see if we can sneak in substantive goals through the gaps.

Sometimes you have to tell a story as a fox (with many, varied ideas) not a hedgehog (with one, big idea). The right's hedgehog story builds in a few ways of basically saying the issue is that we are not Tauranga enough; the left's fox story is that there are so many things we can improve, on top of the ongoing reforms to liberalize zoning and streamline processes, to ensure housing, transport and our built environments are in good order, to make New Zealand more like the bits of Melbourne we like, Tokyo, Singapore, and those four suburbs in London all the Kiwis live in (and not some of the other ones).

So we have a story that gives us a list of substantive goals in response to a pessimistic diagnosis; we've got some slogans on some areas suit these vibes. What are the snippets of policy?  

Building Good Vibes
New Zealand hasn't done design and defect regulation well, and it has lead to some shocking outcomes. The new townhouses boil (which I'll happily take over freezing, but people are complaining); the old ones leak (that is quite an issue).

How do we build good vibes? We encourage good design and spread the risk from homeowners that buy good homes.

The easy way to encourage better building is by making it moronic to build worse. As part of developing standardised zones under the Planning Act, the Government should test new zones by commissioning designs that look great and are cheap, warm, dry and liveable. This will be a necessary proof of concept that the zones are workable. The Government can then release a Design Book with houses that are well-designed, easy and economical to build and any old small to medium sized building firm can spam on a ton of sites, because the zoning permits it. This can be supplemented with any design firms putting forward their own good designs, as in the Australian design competitions. But let's add a hard incentive to go with a gentle nudge.

Crucially, the good designs should have be entitled to a government backed first resort warranty. Such warranties is an increasingly common in Australia. But if the designs are good and, crucially, easy and cheap to do (and, inshallah, fix), and well-known to building inspectors so defects will jump out at them, it might work in New Zealand too. The most elegant, and cheap to build dwellings are 'boring boxes'. And, if you make them in red brick and call them neo-Georgian, normies love them. The set of policies are complementary, and I suspect likely to be popular.

Good vibes might not be free, but they may well be good policy and politics. The cost of good designs would be moderate; the costs of a first resort residential warranty could be considerable. But I think there will be a reaction to this government's noises around designs and defect liability rules and building standards. I think a policy intervention to encourage better design that doesn't pose real risks is appropriate. I don't think anything heavy-handed is needed. And the cost of defects and litigation is so high to the government that good coordinated interventions could pay-off.

I think most people are basically happy to live somewhere warm and dry, in the right place, with reassurance that defects are unlikely and fixable. And I think you can give the people what they want, by maxing-out the benefits of standardised zoning with good spammable designs and warranty rules.
 

Constantly on the Move
We do a lot of big transport projects in New Zealand, they usually go wrong and blow out and the road ones underperform (but look quite nice) and we hardly get any other ones.

We should do two big things on transport: do a ton of incremental improvements on public transport lines, and focus transit oriented development to enable transit, and transit to enable transit oriented development. Many and moderate public transit incremental improvements in the many places moderately intensifying; and a few bigger calls for the places building big (where it is not economically insane to do so). Follow the development where you get the most value for the fewest dollars.

This focuses on spreading the benefits of new public transport broadly, expressly rewarding places building more, and avoiding mega projects (except where they're essential to support mega intensification). More concretely: everywhere building apartments should be getting busways; nowhere should be getting tunneled trams or RONS.

Auckland Isthmus can get a metro and Christchurch and maybe Wellington can get light metro lines, but only to unlock piles of housing to double their metro urban population and density.
 

Using What We've Got Better
New Zealand has a bunch of urban areas, a bunch of spare infrastructure even in those areas, and also a lot of growth happening at the boundaries of those urban areas. Its time to be a bit smarter about where we build and how we use what we've got.

Again, to encourage development we should have a low density targeted rate: charge areas that can easily double their population and have high infrastructure in cities. Remuera, Khandallah, Fendalton can all afford to pay for being low density with decent pipes.

Similarly, complementing the cost-effective and incremental approach to transport funding above, we should be wary about greenfield and particularly if it is low density. User pricing for ongoing road costs makes sense.

I guess there are some slogans you could develop behind these: good things go to those that grow (or just 'reward building') and centralise and command. There is actually a lot that left-wing councils can do in this space. Going hard on upzoning where it makes sense, low-density targeted rates and congestion pricing largely fall in their discretion. Conversely, a left central government has some helpful sticks.
 

Better, Faster, Stronger: Fast Track for the Right Reasons by the Right People
There's a pretty good case for central government to focus on some sorts of planning applications. Centralisation and specialisation are good things that the left likes. Why let councils decide nationally-significant proposals of a scale or sophistication beyond any they have touched in years?

Fast tracking can be good. Fast-track panels can bring special expertise, *can* focus on particular areas that government policy favours and can improve on speed through improved planning capacity instead of bypassing the existing sets of substantive rules. Conversely, councils and commissioners can be captured, inept or overwhelmed. Why not do some things centrally, competently and quickly?

It matters a lot who fast tracks what. New South Wales has an Independent Planning Commission for significant applications, and a Housing Delivery Authority fast track panel to progress these proposals quickly so they can get to the IPC for determination. These has led to  something like 7000 units being rapidly referred to a fast track since January. This bypasses councils, particularly slow or reluctant ones. New Zealand has used slightly different institutional set-ups for fast tracks (in fact, other than EPA being forced to administer it, I think our set-up is better) but that's not a big deal. A skyscraper panel for high density residential, commercial or mixed-use developments is an obvious start. Down the line, one for transport improvements and TOD around it would be great too. 

Public Places as Nice Spaces
New Zealand has issues with anti social behaviour in public, focusing on micromanaging private spaces over making public spaces nice and usable, and encouraging forms of density that aren't great for street vibes. We should let there be more boring boxes on top of each other so long as they make streets look nice by avoiding setbacks and then just build some nice gardens; we should liberalise rules around hospitality (maybe do a tax change between on and off licenses); and we should remove anti-social and disorderly behaviour from public spaces. That's quite a range of snippets of policies all connected to one slogan. These are also probably the most day-to-day impactful policies. People love street design and bars and so on.
 

Conclusion - Time for Good Ideas and Nice Things
This has been a difficult piece to finish. I've been happy with this piece but very cynical about politics recently. 

Leave is approved and I'm going on holiday to a few megacities in a month. Maybe the vibes will be better when I'm back. Maybe I'll have some more fresh thoughts and takes. But I think my case is pretty good. I might be spending my spare time listening to How I'm Feeling Now and Blue Rev. But I think I've pulled out a decent, and optimistic, story for how and why we can get improved built and urban environments. 

So, if we get some  pro-housing, pro-transit, pro-vibes urbanists into power with a progressive story, with some good snippets and slogans to guide policies, plans, projects and comms, then we'll have a lot to look forward to.

Institutions for the Pro-Housing Paradigm Shift

 I reckon two very average house-building jurisdictions have good models for institutions New Zealand should steal. And I reckon that these could be good tools to hurry-up the paradigm shift in planning - from the 'planning judgment' fetishists, to a younger set of pro-housing planners and urban economists.

In New Zealand, we are basking in the afterglow of outrage after Auckland Council appointed a panel of Hearing Commissioners to deny consent for a mid-rise mass timber office block on some gravel-covered site on Karangahape Road. For context, K Road is a major cultural street served by a million bus routes and near a colossally expensive, soon to open train station. One of them was in fact on the Independent Hearings Panel that the entire political spectrum battered relentlessly, like a donkey pinata at a Shrek birthday party. My most sage mutual on planning matters thought this decision was boringly wrong. But boringly wrong in line with the prejudices of a generally NIMBY planning establishment - part senior planners, part influential NIMBYs,

How do you displace such people? You make up new institutions. And we should get institutions that help with plan-making and consenting capacity. 

Ideas for professional and pro-housing institutions that we can steal

The Scottish Government (planning being devolved) has the Planning and Architecture Division, and the Directorate of Planning and Environment Appeals. This centralises the role of Planning (and, because its a hyper discretionary system, architecture) in the PAD. And it ensures that there's a level of appeals against local council decisions to the DPEA before courts. This keeps things administrative and ideally efficient. The national government (being a constituent nation of the United Kingdom) has its own independent officials making the big decisions.

The New South Wales Government (planning being a state issue) has the Housing Delivery Authority, a panel constituted under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979. The panel is not operationally independent, having staff from the (department for planning?). But the panel members may make recommendations to the Minister on declaring residential developments and rezonings to be State Significant Developments, letting the statewide Independent Planning Commission determine them and side-stepping councils. The details are a tad wonky but the design is glorious. The state sifts through major residential applications, focuses explicitly on speeding up applications and prioritises desirable ones. This lets higher level guidance practically encourage sensible basically comply with the rules; not in dumb areas; big.

Scotland is not a great housing performer - the UK is generally pretty piss-poor. It does build slightly more homes than England per capita (which, in fairness, has similar institutions through the Planning Inspectorate). But it does have a certain logical approach to institutions that New Zealand doesn't really have. The Planning and Architecture Division can focus on planning policy and design guidance (so not every council goes around making its own mid-density guide), without being a random part of MfE (a policy shop) or maybe KO (an urban development agency that, admittedly, did 80% state housing). The DPEA means merits appeals on planning decisions don't go to the courts, and there's an institution with specialism and state capacity available nationwide.

New South Wales is a reasonably performer vs NZ historically, but less so recently. It is also builds less than Victoria, with Melbourne growing much faster than Sydney and having more reasonable housing costs. NSW currently builds something like 47,000 houses a year and needs to build 75,000 per year for the next few years to hit its 377,000 new build target under the National Housing Accord. The Minns Government set this up within the past 6 months, it started dropping announcements in January and declared dozens of applications to be State Significant Developments that could build 22,000 units. This shows how the higher state gov can practically incentivise big and sensible applications in a way simply changing substantive rules that councils apply would not. It retains state capacity at the center, in parallel with councils. This is an additional and excellent way to change developer behaviour.

What matters is having capable, independent national or state level bodies that can make decisions. No fast-track is needed. These are ongoing and professional institutions that can build up their capacity, not ad hoc panels addressing ad hoc applications. Ministers can set priorities things, and call-in or designate particular projects as deserving a higher-level institution to make the decision. This appears to be a superior institutional design to address nationally significant applications.

The key linking theme between these two approaches is that these institutions carry out, or assist, a Minister's role in planning. New Zealand mostly minimizes the role of politicians in individual decisions but has a greater judicial role. There may be reasons to think we could make a better trade-off.

Professional, devoted national/state institutions can do good things
There are also other ways that competent, professional institutiona can enhance planning capacity and outcomes. These are to do with

One of the easier ones is standardisation. New South Wales is developing pattern books with designs that will be available and easily consentable, for mid-rise apartments and townhouses. Victoria is following suit with something similar under the Future Homes initiative. Scotland's planning framework has some material on design guidance, but basically leaves these to Local Development Plans.

Scotland's planning framework on design covers street design as well as architecture. It seems to me street design is the more important of the two to micromanage, but I think street design has a much stronger case for regulation. Sausage flats down long driveways are worse for amenity and street vibes than long blocks of flats or terraces down a street that dare to have repetitive facades. And moreover, these engage with having parcels of land that can be efficiently used, and more regular parcels which may assist with standardisation.

Central institutions that provide nationwide guidance on valuable matters would be helpful. This would include building consenting capacity that side-steps over overrides councils when they're being difficult; prioritising how to standardise houses and designs, particular ones that comply with Building Code and future planning laws; and better design of public spaces. These institutions appear particularly effective for merging independent officials with the political direction of ministers, which is admittedly a high risk way of improving state capacity due to the risk of politicisation.

A briefer on paradigms
Thomas Kuhn had an account of the history of science based around the idea of "paradigm shifts", which would lead from one science to another. Paradigms are the sets of core premises, ways of doing things and fundamental knowledge that differentiate one science from another. There is occasionally a collapse in the social and epistemic authority of a paradigm - the whole science changes. People then grasp around in chaos for a replacement. I don't think the reproducibility crisis in social psychology quite got as far as causing a paradigm shift. Kuhn meant things like the difference between pre and post Newton or Einstein in physics. Paradigms are incommensurable - propositions don't really translate between them, and may be incomprehensible from outside the community of scientists.

Incidentally, Kuhn's account of paradigms is a bit undercooked. I have more sympathy for Imre Lakatos's model of science, where a research programme has  both a tight inner core which is protected against change, and outer bits which can be tinkered with in response to new findings. This draws in, for the outer layers of knowledge, Karl Popper's famous falsificationism. Popper views science basically as individual claims that can be disproven, but not really proven; Kuhn views science as a mix of epistemic (knowledge-y, as a gloss for people who did practical degrees) and social aspects that a community of scientists buy into. Lakatos views research programmes as progressive if they generate and confirm novel propositions. If they cease doing so and become regressive, the core of the research project may collapse under social and epistemic strain. This has nothing to do with housing or this thesis, I just think people should shout-out Lakatos's notions around science instead of only Kuhn's.

The very important point, with the ring of truth, is that planning ideas may be undergoing a paradigm shift. New schools of thoughts do generally involve upstarts fighting. And these people are usually from the outside of the institutions,  educated, with new ideas, and challenging. Most the greats of early modern philosopher were upstarts with dubious politics - David Hume was in his 20s when he wrote the Treatise on Human Understanding; John Locke was a propagandist for revolutionaries that once went into exile; Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan partly to justify returning to England after being on the losing side of a civil war. The philosophers in the universities were Aristotelians and clerics.

The Planning Paradigm Shift
To simplify - paradigm shifts are generally old insiders of institutions, panicking as they lose social and epistemic clout, being bulldozed by young outsider radicals, with new ideas. Their ideas shift, and the composition of institutions (certainly internal hierarchies) shift too.

The new-orthodoxy is you can just build things, let them happen, push down housing costs and get better urban outcomes than by micromanaging and procedural complexity and delay. This is a radical, novel notion. Its repeated empirical confirmation renders YIMBY urban economics, and planning, a progressive field. YIMBY policy, procedure and planning is, potentially, a new science drawing on bits of old planning, urban economics, urbanist nerd stuff and the abundance-pilled critique of New Left proceduralism.

This progressive research programme is a threat to the old, entrenched incumbents in the planning world. They probably know Kuhn better than me, but do they know what is coming?

Why would you want both 'hey these institutions seem cool' and stuff on paradigms on the same post? Well, I thought about both of them today and I quite like both ideas. And institutional change can be one way of speeding up the generational changeover. If we have some new agencies carrying out roles akin to these institutions, we can stack them with new-orthodox planners and urban economists. We can have a few new designers who care about street layouts but aren't prescriptive on how many materials houses should have.

We should think more about institutional design (and probably processes too), not just substantive rules. And we should definitely think about who makes the rules, at what level and in which branch of government. The paradigm shift of planning isn't just about what is in the plans.

A Labour Urbanist Agenda for 2026

An Urbanist Platform for Labour 2027

The big not-quite-partisan divide in New Zealand politics is urbanists vs. suburbanists. National seems to mostly suburbanists but has let an urbanist drive a lot of their housing and infrastructure (and, inshallah, transport soon) policy. But Labour has not been super vocal on urbanism this term. In this post, I’ll explain this divide and argue that Labour should adopt a set of concrete, sensible and politically advantageous urbanist policies for the 2026 election.


The Urbanist vs. Suburbanist Divide

The big partisan divide in NZ is increasingly between a highly-educated elite on the left, a wealthy but not educated elite on the right (Piketty calls this Brahmin-left and merchant-right). Broke students flatting in inner suburb villas vote Green; rich tradies in McMansions that they own in the outer suburbs of Tauranga vote for ACT; people in-between vote in-between.

As may be clear, where you live and in what type of house sorta but doesn't perfectly tie into this partisan divide. The broke student commuting in from Paekakariki probably still supports Greens; an Epsom tradie certainly voted for Seymour. Highly educated people generally like cities and towns and lowly educated but well-off people in NZ are often more rural and suburban. But there are still some educated professionals in National (generally associated with the 'liberal' wing but it might as well be called the urban professional wing), and still some social conservatives without postgrad degrees in Labour (most  people coming to mind are South Auckland Pacific Islander MPs). As a result, the urbanist vs suburbanist divide is as much within as between parties, even though it correlates. 

Urbanists generally want more intense housing in more urban areas with more apartments, public and active transport routes and public spaces. Suburbanists want the opposite and are generally grumpy about anything happening other than adding carparks and lanes. These also mostly but don't fully overlap with general support for new development. Right-wing YIMBYs generally want to build loads of new suburbs, while left-wing YIMBYs tend to be reasonably staunchly urbanist (or, in a few cases, anti-market pro-state housing zealots). Then there are the co-operative housing nerds, who are their own thing and properly niche. But for most purposes, NZ housing, transport and infrastructure policy comes down more to urbanists vs suburbanists than any other divide.


Policy Progress and Partisan Dynamics
Generally speaking, policy progress gets made on topics when it matters enough for stuff to get done and where parties agree. That is, a low partisan salience issue where major parties have compatible positions. While National appears to have mainly suburbanist MPs and voters, its urbanists appear to be pushing some good policy through on RMA reform and infrastructure funding and financing. Labour itself put through RMA replacement legislation and enacted both the National Policy Statement on Urban Develoment and Medium Density Residential Standards to try force councils to promptly permit more intensification, as well as getting KO to build a lot more directly. There is the potential for some degree of continuity and concurrence on housing liberalisation.

But housing policy has been unwound and stalled by suburbanites even as it is liberalised and reformed by urbanites. Because housing is high-salience and terrified by ACT outflanking National on suburbanism,  Luxon made his one and possibly only captain's call on policy as party leader to undermine the Medium Density Residential Standards. (An underrated part of the election was National's terror of ACT, competing with them more for right-marginal voters than Labour for center-marginal voters, and choosing to give a boost to NZF rather than finish them off) Behind the scenes, there are various drags from suburbanites (some even in very urban electorates) pertaining to 'character' areas, townhouses generally, recession lines and setbacks and so on.
 
Overseas politicians keep, hilariously, zoning for massive housing intensification in their opponents' safe seats. This is maybe the apex of partisan motivated upzoning, ratrher than NZ's attempts at bipartisan or at least quiet upzoning. In Australia, the Victoria Labor government's designation of Malvern as a spot for piles of high density residential towers has caused the Malvern opposition MP to furiously whinge online). In the UK, Michael Gove intensified the inner cities that are safe Labour seats; while Starmer has more ambitious housing targets overall but reduced inner city goals while raising targets in further out Tory voting suburbs.

 

Policy Priorities for a Refreshed Labour Urbanism

 I think this sets up a solid Labour-coded urbanist-pilled agenda for its glorious return to office:

1) Continuity with past successes by committing to and ruthlessly policing council compliance with the NPS-UD and the MDRS. Councils have been stalling, but Labour can use the threat of commissioners now that National has raised the specter for Wellington (which has an effective urbanist majority council). 

2) Focus on urban intensification upzone wealthy, low density National and ACT urban electorates to the moon! Make the most of existing infrastructure, transit and inner city land, and let's get the Epsom 101 and the Burj Ngaio built! Use updated infrastructure pricing rules they will inherit robustly, to avoid subsidizing new sprawl in conservative suburban areas.

3)  Revive KO as an urban regeneration developer focusing on regeneration, intensification and transit oriented development. Aim to generate revenue from developments to fund future projects and transit lines.

Combined, these show continuity with their recent stint in power; double-down on a popular policy but in way that puts National suburbanites in an uncomfortable, ugly NIMBY position; and distinguishes them from both their last stint (building state housing) and National now (gutting KO) in a state-led urban regeneration approach that fits Labour ideology. All need to be done with a sense of urgency, so Labour can be seen to deliver immediately. 

I put the cases for each of these below. These are a mix of shamelessly political reasons, as well as more earnest policy reasons. Given I am - and my audience probably is - urbanist and a nerd, these are at a pretty high levle.

Chris Hipkins and Partisan Upzoning

Chris Hipkins has never struck me as an urbanist, but he hasn't come out as publicly suburbanist either. He represents Upper Hutt, which is reasonably suburban but also a growing and even slightly intensifying city. It is the original type of Transit Oriented Development: a set of commuter suburbs along a trainline. 

His politics lean moderate and he also likes to get stuff done. He was quite willing to further haggle-down the MDRS just for National to permit broad upzoning and minimize the degree of partisan shit-fighting on the point, so builders could get on and spam townhouses with certainty. But he also is quite happy to get stuck into partisan brawling, which his critics miss. Their  basic critique seems to be that he doesn't interrupt Luxon when he's making a mistake. As the election draws near and the self inflicted wounds and battle lines become clear, Chippy will have a bit more to stay.

Chippy strikes me as someone who will be more than happy to upzone the shit out of right wing electorates. I think he should: if Epsom remains an electorate it should be zoned to the moon; 'character' areas with millionaire National and ACT voters are perfect places to one-up the Nats on Going for Growth. He should potentially also cut-off the lifeblood of conservative locales - why permit exurban sprawl, with its lavish subsidies and comical road costs? This can be done through adopting, wholeheartedly, current National ideas on infrastructure funding and financing.

This is good on the merits - these areas should definitely be upzoned - but it is also a sign of power for Labour. It turns over high-amenity suburbs to its urbanist, young professional supporters. A non-trivial part of politics is delivering concrete material and quality of life improvements for your base. And Hipkins should do this in a brutally partisan, urbanist way against suburbanist National voters in their million dollar villas.

 

Concrete Policies for an Urbanist Labour 

There are good reasons to think Chippy will embrace targeted upzoning of National enclaves, but what about the more broad urbanist platform?

I do think Labour will run on continuity with its successful housing policy. Twyford somehow snuck the NPS-UD past Cabinet colleagues without many of them grasping what it entailed. The MDRS was, briefly, a good sign that housing discussions could be bipartisan and move past zoning and onto other barriers to building. Labour MPs will want to campaign on some concrete and broadly popular achievement, and promise efficient changes building on these. This means promising to crack the whip on councils, up to and including appointing commissioners to power through housing plan changes. After all, National has been making a habit of targeting any councils that are politically expedient - even the Wellington City Council that has delivered ambitious housing plan changes. What National threatened to do for political theater, Labour can do in its first 100 days and present as a fait accompli.

A key priority of the Nats was to find everything that could be counted as an Ardern-era achievement, extirpate it then say there had never been anything. Choking KO is an obvious example. Revitalising KO, and calling back to sensible housing policies - which did not make the world end - are solid starting points for Labour urbanist policy. But Kainga Ora had some awkward issues that mean something smarter than just rebooting its large scale construction programme are needed.

Labour should run on reviving KO's role as a mass builder and urban redeveloper. State housing is hellishly unpopular, while upzoning along  existing transit lines, in existing centers, and building new trans systems is very popular. The popular things also tend to make more money than inherently high-cost, low-return good quality social housing. The role of being a mass builder and urban redeveloper is popular and counter-cylical, without having the political flaws of Ardern-era iteration of KO.

A transit-oriented urban redevelopment company can be lucrative, large scale and effective. It can deliver, be good and be popular. KO could compulsorily buy land on and around key stations, intensely develop it then making a bucket selling or renting the offices, retail units and apartments has a lot going for it. Things like the recently announced Downtown Towers in Auckland are great - and is there any reason why KO couldn't do similar things around other stations? This would deliver large amounts of well-placed residential and commercial units. And owning land is a straightforward form of value capture.

A tight focus on KO making money creates a virtuous cycle of urban redevelopment. Returns from successful developments on stations will, eventually, permit construction of new transit lines. KO could use the refreshed arsenal of infrastructure funding and financing tools. The purchases and developments are likely to rely on the Urban Development Act. This is a fun bit of leg Labour passed but didn't really get to flex in office. Private capital could also help - Labour is likely to favour investment from Kiwisaver over other sources. I don't love that as a risk-allocating measure, but the politics make sense.

Conclusion

By embracing a mildly urbanist platform, Labour can position itself as the party of growth, progress, and aspiration. This approach would allow Labour to appeal to its urban base, reach out to younger voters, and exploit the weaknesses of its conservative opponents. With the right messaging and policy execution, urbanism could be a winning issue for Labour in 2027.

 

 

Fuck your "family-sized flat" requirements

People yearn for bachelor pads, but are everywhere in flats.

I live, like most young professionals, in a flat with two other dudes roughly my age and social status who would all quite like to live on our own. I've known one for 15 years and the other for a fortnight (thankfully, he seems nice even if he despises cycleways). It is the nicest flat I've lived in, in the best location, and its even warm inside. I'd rather live alone, or with my girlfriend.

The primary shortage of housing is for 1 and 2 bedroom units, primarily in cities and inner suburbs. This is generally true across Anglosphere cities with housing shortages. Household sizes are smaller than the era when houses actually got built. But it is common for people to having flatmates for years. I've flatted for 9 years, in 7 flats, it was good when I was 19 and living with my friends from my hall and less so in my late 20s. And despite the indignity of living with others, fighting for enough fucking fridge space to have multiple cheeses a 28 year old on a 6 digit salary, people keep on saying that new housing developments should be required to offer family sized flats.

I don't trust property developers on many points, but I do trust them to try make money. If they see a way to make money selling 1 or 2 bedroom flats, they will. If they see a way to make money selling 3 bedroom flats, they will.

In Christchurch right now, flats with 2 bedrooms are very cheap and with 3 bedrooms are very expensive. Or is it the other way around? In any event, I trust its cohort of townhouse builders  to adjust and build slightly bigger/smaller units for the next 18 months to chase those dollars.

A lot of housing views come down to a basic divide in what property rights and regulations are for: do they emphasize the right way of living? Or do they serve liberal ideological and economic ends? That is, do property rights let you do what you want? My view, as a liberal and a free-marketeer, is that we should let people build housing and use it as they want.

Not everyone is liberal. Then, sure, demand that 17% of units in new developments have 3 or 4 units and get the renters - who want privacy, or dignity, or just a place to blare Kendrick or The Rest is Politics or /r/gonewildaudio - go fuck themselves in whatever you deign to allow. See how easy you make politics and how garbage you make policy when you go full Everything Bagel rather than just relentlessly pushing for housing policy to deliver massive amounts of well-located, tolerably good housing. Treat the people who have the money to pay the rent to make new developments pencil as undeserving.

Singletons, bachelors, young professionals, people dating but its early stages or complicated or non-committal; they all need housing and they don't really want shared housing. Just about everyone flatting in a shared flat would, quietly or eventually, prefer their own space. We need a truly massive number of 1 - 2 bedroom units in New Zealand. Maybe a million at this rate.

Just build housing. Quite a lot of it. In nice places, by other houses and stores and bus stops and bars. Tall. In boring boxes. And let people make money off building housing, because the alternative is people making money from not building housing. And that sucks, and if housing sucks then peoples' lives suck.

We need to stop making demands that new housing deliver other social goals . Urban regeneration is nice but does that justify the Tamaki Regeneration Company building a thousand houses in a decade (wait that sounds good?) when it was meant to do 400 a year (uh what?) at vast expense (hmmm)? Does it justify the dumb 'affordability' and 'social housing' requirements that hurt the viability of new housing in the US, the UK and Australia? Does it justify the dumb demands to build less lucrative family-sized flats in developments, when the demand is for bachelor pads? No, we'd be better off trying to flood the market with new housing so firms had to get into the niches.

Build housing. A lot of it. In nice places.

Mega Auckland 2050

Mega Auckland 2050

New Zealand needs Mega-Auckland - a Sydney-sized city of 5 million people that looks like Singapore, with the isthmus full of tall towers, modern metros and gorgeous green spaces. Change-makers need to make it happen over the next 25 years. 

Why? Two reasons. 

First, the Donovan dilemma: New Zealand can’t afford to maintain its current infrastructure as a thinly spread and slowly-growing country. New Zealand has stunted per-capita economic growth and productivity improvements. In the long-run our quality of life, power, safety and stability will decline unless this changes. 

Second, New Zealand needs to grow our economic and hard power as a nation by thinking bigger. Cozy backwaters in the south Pacific are unlikely to have a good time in international relations now. This generally reflects Matt Yglesias’s case for the USA to think bigger, but New Zealand is in a worse position with fewer options. 

New Zealand’s needs to address Donovan dilemma by going for growth, but it needs hard power to do it. As a small state ever less protected by the struggling rules-based international order, New Zealand should seek more raw power to defend its economic and strategic interests on a more even playing field. Our vulnerability requires us to aim to be a medium-sized economy with some weight and hard power; and improved international relations weight requires us to have a bigger economy with more hard power - more blood and treasure, as old-school IR nerds say.

This leads into the two ways of dealing with the dilemma - going hard on economic growth to maintain and upgrade infrastructure; or minimizing the burden on existing infra, accepting stagnation, and probably retreating to occupy less of New Zealand where it is cost-effective to do so. 

 

I’m going to suggest that New Zealand go for growth, by explaining what it would look like. 

The strong starting point

Auckland is a city of nearly 2 million people, the commercial and cultural core of the country, the largest Polynesian city on earth and home to migrants from all over New Zealand and the world. It has some solid public transport networks with the improving suburban rail lines and the impressive Bus Rapid Transit between the CBD and North Shore, some massive new commercial and apartment buildings along its waterfront,and is a similar size to the capitals of the mid-tier Australian states. Our firms are mostly headquartered there; most of our professional services firms biggest offices are there; much of our infrastructure spending is there.

Auckland has had recent big successes:

• The super city successfully amalgamated councils into a single local government area.

• Improved public transport, particularly the Northern Expressway and improving bus frequencies.

• Broad upzoning, used as a case study for the benefits of broad residential upzoning, maybe the most broad and studied in the Anglosphere.

• Waterfront revitalisation, based around Britomart, including the Wynward Quarter and Commercial Bay, soon to include the Downtown Towers (replacing a carpark).

When things change for the better in New Zealand, they usually change the most, and first, in Auckland. The current plan is something like a few new public transport routes, medium-density housing of townhouses and terraces in much of the city, some mid-rise apartments, a bit of greenfield growth and a population peak of maybe 3 million. Maybe a bridge. These are meaningful but not massive improvements, and we should think bigger.

 

Problems and potential

This piece is more propaganda than diagnosis, but the short story is:

• Auckland is broadly low-density, sprawling from a small core of tall buildings in the CBD, mainly along the waterfront and Queen and Shortland Streets. Even the inner suburbs ringing the CBD like Epsom which are almost entirely 1-2 storey houses.

• Aucklanders rely on cars to get around, especially outside the (mostly low-density) inner to mid-lying isthmus suburbs. This is despite being an increasingly big city and some successful big public transport projects (the Northern Expressway; the City Rail Link)

• Auckland is in a highly constrained area - it is an isthmus with a waterfront, limited space to go either west (the Waitakere ranges) or east (already gone out to the sea that way) and with the North Shore separated by the harbour and connected primarily by a single bridge.

• Auckland has a single, primary CBD with massive new commercial buildings and, generally, a pile of towers and good transit connections.

• Outside of the CBD, there are a range of smaller town centers, with limited high density. Jobs are spread thinly, often in suburban office or industrial parks.

• For the above reasons, public transport is mainly viable for CBD jobs and not the large number of more spread  roles.

• Auckland is next to very high value green land to its north and south, making it costlier to sprawl in the directions where there are land.

• Auckland has a fair number of reactionaries, NIMBYs, mediocrities and hypocrites who whinge about most good things, and we have political systems that empower them and planning systems that are gamed by them..

Auckland is the core of urban New Zealand despite these issues. But it could and should be bigger. If we stick on our current path, we will get a fair few new townhouses, some trams by 2050 if we are lucky, and otherwise nothing much will change. This won't change the underlying problems.

You don’t get Mega Auckland with our ongoing incremental reforms - things like focusing on “medium density” where almost all allowable heights will cap out at 6 floors. For a mid-rise, that is barely getting started - 8 and 10 storeys are common mid rise apartment heights. Costs spike at certain levels, such as above 4 or so floors when structural requirements get a lot more onerous. Allowing 6 storeys, when you need 8 or 10 to be viable, allows nothing. We’ve got to think bigger.

Right now Auckland has the density of a nice provincial town, which is nice for those who like that. But New Zealand Inc needs a big fuck-off city with big fuck-off economic power. 

What we're missing is ambition - we are missing massive housing, we are missing the modern metro, and we are missing public placemaking in good locations to serve the swarms of new and future residents.

Massing Massive and Modern Metro

Missing Massive is the lack of high-density residential apartment blocks. The gap is in how few high-density apartment blocks are outside the CBD. People would undoubtedly live in towers in Ponsonby - people live in a tower in New Lynn. All we need is to mass enable and encourage high-density apartments, on top of a base of mid density throughout the city, a hawker mall or three and we are there. 

Modern Metro is the light rail Aucklanders need, not trams. Trams are slow, generally in traffic and low capacity. There’s a reason some Melbourne public transport nerds considers Auckland’s system with a lot of frequent buses may be better, city-wide. Light metros fit more people in, go faster, and can serve longer routes and more dense areas. They can go along at street level ("at-grade"), or even on streets. But it can also go on elevated passages with sound shields, to quietly head through major bits of the city. 

[source: https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2020/08/27/buying-the-light-metro-ip/] - Look at these bad boys

 

Planning for Mega Auckland over 25 years lets us plan for heavier metro and high-density development along the lines. New metro complements the longer, less frequent, completely separate suburban and regional commuter rail lines. Improved speed and frequency will make the most of the existing heavy rail. But a true metro - underground or elevated - will boost capacity from different areas, and between hubs that don’t even exist yet. 

 

Heavy metro, how good

 

 

The case for a Big New Zealand

New Zealand is not in a benign strategic environment. The environment of expanding free trade with bigger and more prosperous trade partners has ended and started retracting. Protecting our interests requires us to be both richer and have more hard power. And New Zealand cannot get rich just by trading already built, already leaking houses to each other. It must grow, and have both a strong domestic and  import market and be worth exporting to. And part of that growth is to get the strategic and economic power to trade and engage with the world on better terms.

In a scary world, we need to do way better on the international stage. We are losing relative clout in the Pacific. Our two biggest trading partners keep clashing and are at times erratic. New Zealand needs more power to fend off competition just to remain a regional power in the Pacific. Singapore and Australia balance the same relations with us, with more people and power, and it seems to be working for them with strong ties in the east and west. Their greater size and wealth is an unsubtle lesson. 

New Zealand needs more power, more people and more money. These fit together and require a bigger, better Auckland.  

It is all about Auckland 

Why the focus on Auckland? Because a) people go to cities which are big job markets, Auckland is the attractive and obvious place to attract further migrants, and b) deeper markets with intense concentration are much better. 

One 5 million person city is more specialised, and more attractive for investment, than ten 500,000 person cities. Aldi exists in Australia because the scale of its cities makes it worthwhile. They fit in the niche of being complementary to and cheaper than existing duopoly full service supermarkets. Melbourne’s markets fall in the boutique niches remaining. What goes for supermarkets goes for many industries. 

Agglomeration effects - the economic benefits of big and compact cities - are hyper-location specific . It is not enough to have a big city: people have to head to the same cafes in the morning and the same bars after work for the spillovers of knowledge and connections to create virtuous cycles of growth and prosperity. But this means the most potential we can get is by being super connected, super compact and in appropriate places super dense. 

New Zealand has one realistic option for connected, compact, super dense growth: Auckland, mainly on the isthmus. Matt Yglesias argued for One Billion Americans, as a way of thinking bigger [https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21449512/matt-yglesias-one-billion-americans]. But the US has tons of cities. It could get to a billion in a range of ways. It could focus on having a few mega cities (current or new); it could repopulate huge swathes of old cities and smaller state capitals. It could simply permit mild density everywhere, because its cities are so numerous, large and low density. It is also extremely powerful and extremely rich. By contrast, New Zealand only has one city of any size, unfavourable geography, less wealth, and a distant location from other markets.

Source: https://www.hud.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Documents/Proactive-Releases/hud-2024003621-research-on-housing-as-an-enabler-of-economic-growth-and-productivity.pdf 

So Auckland needs to grow, and its commercial center needs to stay exactly where it is but triple in size and scale. Auckland has a gorgeous waterfront with a pile of new towers along it. Further intensification of the CBD as a gorgeous, well-connected area is already on the way. The suburbs immediately around the CBD (like Parnell and Ponsonby) should be entirely rezoned for high-density, and expect to be rebuilt.

Outside the CBD, Auckland should concentrate on high density transit oriented development and medium density infill. The city has space for dozens, maybe hundreds, of towers along existing transit lines (I’m told the ground is good around the Northern Expressway stops). We can take a complementary approach by connecting the major centers of Auckland with a metro, and build skyscraper parks around these stations. Medium density is appropriate in places without high capacity rapid transit. But this should enable 6 to 10 floor apartments, not just townhouses.

25 years is doable

It is realistic for Auckland to triple its size in 25 years, building high density towers throughout the isthmus connected by new metro lines.

The Taipei metro only started being built in 1996, months before I was born. It now has 5 lines, with a ton of elevated tracks. At the same time, Taipei has beautiful night markets and streets. Shenzhen was a town of 50,000 in 1990 and opened its first metro line in 2004; it now has like 20 million people and 17 metro lines. New Zealand isn't anything like that size or scale - even Taipei is twice the size of NZ now. New Zealand doesn’t require immigration much greater than the 2010s to grow this much. We can make a Mega Auckland by 2050. 

 

The rest of the country will be better off too

People who want small cities, or just Auckland at its current size, will have options. Christchurch may end up as populated as Auckland is now, as the South Island commercial hub and New Zealand's second city (second largest cities tend to be half the size of the biggest).

Smaller cities might be perfectly served by mid density intensification - Christchurch and Lower Hutt's have any amount of townhouses; a number of 6-floor or so narrow apartment buildings are now being developed in Wellington. Each of these are gorgeous and liveable typologies if they are in areas connected by transit and rich in walking-distance amenities. You can live by bus stops and train stations, on top of cafes and gyms, near your friends and with parks and schools visible from your balcony. Those can be supported by buses and trams.

And if you like even smaller places to live, the point of the growth response to the Donovan dilemma is to ensure there cities have the people and wealth to keep funding infrastructure and roads to small places in the provinces. Mega Auckland is the only way to be sure we can keep nice roads out to Thames or Castle Point. If we go for degrowth, we will likely have to do managed retreat on infrastructure rationing grounds, not just climate adaptation.

And maybe only Auckland will have a bougie shoe store, but at least you’ll be able to get some sick boots couriered down to Gore.

Conclusion

The Donovan dilemma requires NZ to commit hard to either growth or degrowth. We will all be a lot better off from growth. Auckland could be the capital of the Pacific, a regional peer to Melbourne and Sydney, and a southern counterpart to Hong Kong or Singapore. Auckland will be a bigger, better city, in a richer, more powerful country if we go hard on growth. It is doable. So, we should do it.