NZ Politics

Lol Jeff I’m a greenie and I talk about ridiculous zoning and regulations all the time. You aren’t alone or crazy for wanting to fight this fight.

You shouldn’t need a car to live in a city. That’s a symptom of decades of woeful city planning modelled on America, where car company lobbyists call the shots. Endless car-dependent urban sprawl is locking young people out of stable housing options close to where they work. “Intensification” in the world of our new CEO Mr Luxon and his landlord mates means cramming more beds into already over-crowded flats and boarding houses and building 2-story seven-figure 80m2 luxury shoeboxes, rather than building the 10-story buildings with stacks of self-contained apartments that a proper central-city needs to have.

Here’s how I would fix it:

• relax resource consent requirements for 10-story buildings around key urban areas such as malls and inside the four aves; also relax rules on three-storey intensification projects to build self-contained semi-detached townhouses
• encourage mixed-use buildings — ground floor is retail/food (there’s your laundromat), next one or two floors are commercial office space (there’s your job) and the next three to seven stories are self-contained one-or-two bedroom residential apartments (there’s your home with your own kitchen)
• start doubling rates annually on undeveloped land in the central city - including gravel pit parking lots - to get some movement on finally transforming these into places for people to live and work in this city
• deeper local government investment in social housing with targeted rates on unaffordable housing projects - ie if the project does not make some honest effort to provide ongoing affordable housing they get slapped with a special rate that goes towards funding social housing for those in need
• adopt 15-minute city principles (no, they aren’t a globalist conspiracy) so that getting into a car is not a rewuired part of your daily routine - you can just walk/bike to the doctor, school, movies, pub, maccas, supermarket, library, etc. That also means improving cycling infrastructure and public transport availability.

Some of these are things our Green-aligned city councillors have been pushing consistently for years, and recently they’ve been having increasing success. You are welcome to come join us in this fight, we need your help.

Also, yearning for more fossil fuel investment right now is a bit like building a horse barn in 1912. Even leaving aside the environmental impact (which is massive, and real, and something we all should all be working to fix), green options are already becoming cheaper to implement, and they hugely reduce our dependence on the international oil market which is famously a controlled cartel market and not in our favour as a tiny island nation with low productivity.