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.