John MacDonald: Housing intensification is the future - Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

Be careful what you wish for. 

That’s how I’m feeling about the Government giving Christchurch an exemption from the new housing intensification rules, which would have enabled three, three-storey properties to be built on single sections anywhere in the city.

Instead, that level of intensification is going to be limited to certain parts of town, including the city centre, Church Corner, Riccarton, Hornby, Linwood, Shirley, Merivale, Edgeware, and Papanui.

But I think the Government is just letting Christchurch shoot itself in the foot. Because we will, eventually, come to regret it.

Mayor Phil Mauger is delighted though, because the city council pushed back and claimed we were doing enough already on the intensification front.

A few months back, the council agreed to extend the areas where it would be happy to have medium density zoning with three, three storey buildings per section. Then wrote to the Government saying it thought it had gone far enough and requested an exemption from more intensification in other parts of the city.

The council has got what it asked for, and I think we will live to regret it. Because it’s only going to mean one thing: the city expanding beyond where it is now.

Which is why I’ve always said that we need to get over ourselves and accept that greater housing density is the only way forward, especially when we consider the population growth happening here.

And, with the city growing, the options are either growing outwards or upwards.

Whether we want to keep chewing up land and building more to the south, more to the north, and more to the west; or whether we do more with the space we’re occupying at the moment.

Unfortunately, the lack of foresight at our city council —and the government buying-into that lack of foresight— means we’re going to continue expanding. Chewing up good land.

All because we have this old-hat idea that everybody needs and wants the quarter-acre section.

But we’ve got a housing affordability problem in this country and, if you want your kids to be able to afford to buy their own place, it’s not going to be somewhere with a big backyard. So we need more apartments and townhouses – the places you get with greater housing density.

What’s more, putting limits on housing intensification in Christchurch is going to mean more and more houses being built in places like Rolleston and Prebbleton. Which are not in Christchurch, they’re in the Selwyn district, and that will mean more and more people travelling into the city every day, using Christchurch’s roading infrastructure and not paying a bean towards it.

Another reason why this limit on housing intensification in Christchurch is a bad move.

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