Chris Bishop: Housing Minister on the plan to 'flood' the market with affordable land

Housing Minister Chris Bishop will today unveil the Government’s plan to “flood the market’ with land for development in a bid to end New Zealand’s housing crisis. 

Bishop will use a speech to the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand today to announce a slew of changes to New Zealand’s planning laws recently agreed by Cabinet. He will argue the changes will flood the market with affordable land to develop and make it easier and cheaper to develop that land into housing. 

Some of the changes are bound to be controversial; the Government will abolish councils’ ability to set fixed urban-rural boundaries and will abolish powers that let councils mandate balconies or minimum floor area sizes for developments. 

This means the market, and not councils, will set the minimum size of new apartments. This could be controversial, but Bishop will defend his changes in his speech, noting the rules “can significantly increase the cost of new apartments, and limit the supply of lower cost apartments”. 

Bishop told Mike Hosking most councils will go along, but he expects a few to disagree.  

Councils will be required to plan for 30 years of housing growth. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So change is rolling on at going aura. We've got
a letter of expectation from the Housing Minister. Our financial
stability is the top priority. And further enhancing that is
an announcement coming today more land availability around the country
to build more houses at a cheaper price. Housing Minister
Chris Bishop with us good morning, Good morning reportages. This morning,
you are going to quote unquote flood the country with

(00:20):
land in today's announcement. That's true.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
We're going to let cities grow. It's really important. We've
got a housing crisis. We need to allow our cities
to throw. We need to get rid of the Aukland
metropolitan urban limit. Let auck can grow out at the fringe,
but also do sensible density around transit corridors and around
our train stations. More apartments by train stations, more mixture
sowning that our cities grow and get on top of
this multi generational problem of housing and affordablyity.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
You've got council buy in.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
Well, the councils have got to follow the rules set
by central government. I think most councils will be on
board with it. I think it'll be a bit spicy
with a few of them, but we will just work
our way through that in good time.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
And when you say, Spice, what are you going to do,
just tell them what to do. It is what it is,
get on with it.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Well, that's that's the way the rules. Already there's a
thing called the National Policy State of an Even Development
which sets the rules of the game to councils and
differents to housing. That was introduced by the last government.
So we're building on that and so we'll just work
our way through it with them.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Is this mainly metropolitan rural New Zealand. Provincial New Zealand
doesn't really need to worry about any of this because
it's not really a problem for them or not.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah, what we call Tier one and two cities, so Auckland, Wellington,
christ Church, Hamilton, Toronto. We're not talking about provincial and
regional and rural councils. You know they've they've got growth
ambitions as well, but we're really talking about our big cities.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Where does Kaying Aura fit into this.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Well, ki Aura is a financially troubled organization. As a government,
we've made it a real priority to get that under control.
It's a forty five billion dollar company, very important institution,
for the Crown as we put in place a new
chair in Simon Meuta and we've just replaced and refreshed
the board. We've got five new board members have started there,
and Nicol Laisni made it's very clear to them that

(02:04):
we want them to eliminate losses, cut their costs and
get back to their core business, which is actually being
a landlord for often quite vulnerable people and maintaining a
state housing stock that is in some cases very old
and in a very bad state.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yes. Counter argument to that is we need more houses
and they're not building them or won't be building as many,
and who fills that gap, Well.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
We'll be building social houses. Kind of AURA will build
around three thousand social houses in the next year alone,
for example, and we've funded fifteen hundred new social housing
places from twenty twenty five onwards via the community housing sector.
And once we've got a turnaround plan in place with
kind of AURA, we may well put more money into
KO for them to build more state houses, but we're

(02:45):
not going to do that. It would be irresponsible to
give them a blank check to build more houses until
we're confident they've got their costs under control and they're
financially sustainable as an organization.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
So that's what we're doing, and what's the turnaround time
and allers.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Waiting for a plan from them by November this year
and we'll make decisions after that.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
And how much of this is about building houses not
incurring debt, or how much of it's about them not
being bastards of landlords, never evicting anybody and having gang
members traumatize people.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Oh, it's a bit of everything, to be honest. I mean,
they need to be a better landlord. We've made that
very clear. We're actually seeing a few green shirts have
changed there. Don't want to get too excited about it,
but we are seeing some good numbers coming through. So
they do need to be a better landlord. They need
to look after their tenants well, and they do need
to maintain their properties properly, and they need to cut
their costs. Let's get rid of the sort of bespoke
designs to get some architects all over the place. At

(03:36):
the end of the day, we're just building good quality
state houses. They don't have to be mentioned. They just
have to be good quality state houses that often quite
vulnerable where people can have as a hope.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
I got a text the other day from a builder
who was claiming the average bill price in this country
is about four and a half thousand dollars a square
meter coying or seven a half thousand. Do you know
if that's true or not.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
It could possibly be true. It is definitely the fact
that kinnel Or has engaged in some very expensive developments
that I've been pretty worried about, and so we've made
it clear to the board, cut your costs, focus on
your call roles and responsibilities, and just deliver good quality,
affordable state houses for people who need them.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
Appreciate time, Chris Bishop, Housing Ministry.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
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