this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland
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First of all, good for Auckland. I wish my city (whose metro area has about a million more people than the entirety of New Zealand) would have the courage do similar.
However, I gotta say I'm not a huge fan of the built form of the pictured examples, with five or six detached units in a row front-to-back on a single-family lot. It would make more sense to me to build more traditional quadplex apartment buildings (e.g. like this) instead.
I wonder if this is about expectations of buyers? I would say most people in NZ would consider a detached house as normal and desirable and a flat/apartment as less so. They may get more money selling four detached houses than a quadplex.
The desirability would be for a range of reasons, but a big one that comes to mind is ownership structure. The pictured houses could be freehold with a shared right of way for access. A quadplex introduces a need to have a body corporate or some structure for maintenance of the shared building, and likely limitations on what changes you can make without getting approval from all the other owners.
I think you're right.
Body corporates can be expensive and not having one is foolish. Even with townhouses I anecdotally know someone whose efforts to remediate their leaky house took many more years/dollars than it should have because the overseas owner of the abutting house kept refusing permission for things to do with their shared wall and roof section.
Yeah I feel like we don't have the model quite right. A body corporate at least moves you to only needing a majority vote (actually only 50% I believe).
But we could go further.
What if we could apply to the local council and if the request was reasonable they could approve the work to proceed, and require the other party to contribute if applicable?
I'm sure it is about ticking the checkboxes for buyers' expectations, on paper. But the end result is just that: nothing but ticking the box, while failing to deliver the actual benefit the feature implies.
It's kind of like how my house has 4' x 4' closets in the bedrooms so they can be called "walk-in closets," but the extra depth is fucking useless and all it accomplishes is to eat away from the square footage of the actual room. (I'm ripping them out to put in normal reach-in depth closets instead because I hate them so much.)
...Sorry for the rant.
Anyway, the point is that a well-designed apartment or townhouse can be lived in better than a poorly-designed detached house with no windows on two sides because there's a pointless 2-foot gap between buildings just so they can tick the box of "detached," but that's the tradeoff that looks like it's being made here. These things don't even appear to have any greenspace (common or otherwise), while the example I linked to would fit on one of those lots and still have room to be set back from the street the same distance as the other houses as well as a shared back yard.
Oh for sure. I don't know how you beat the buyer's expectations, though!
I think the section/lot is too narrow for that though. Realistically the non-detached option is probably "townhouses" which are increasingly prevalent in Auckland.
Huh, I seem to have different vocabulary for these things. I would call a fully detached house on a tiny section a townhouse. I'd call what you have pictured terraced housing.
I have no idea where I got these words from.
Technically speaking I think a townhouse is anything in a complex on shared land. But in NZ real estate terminology the not joined up ones tend to just be called "cross-lease" houses, whereas the joined up/terracey ones are called "townhouses".
Hence I used scare quotes and included a picture, cos I know it's not universal!
I think most people refer to anything that's denser than single family homes but not as dense a apartments as townhouses.
I think cross lease is a different thing and refers to how the land is divided legally? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Definitely, if I remember right it was always cheaper to set up a cross lease than to subdivide a section, so most of the old freestanding infill falls into that category.
Yeah also slightly denser older places like granny flats. Causes a lot of headaches down the line when shared structures need maintenance and one of the owners is a slumlord, especially with the increase in heavy rain in recent years and neglected drainage.
Yeah the maintenance agreements can be a nightmare.
Also I heard a bizarre story about a cross lease neighbours at war type situation where there were no legally defined outdoor areas so these guys were hanging out on the other people's deck all the time to annoy them.
Most of the houses I would have considered townhouses would not be on shared land, but are subdivided freehold land. I'm going to be a lot more careful with the term in future!
Out of curiousity I just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out there are regional differences as well!
Your definition seems to be the old North American idea (but now they use it to mean two different things).
In the UK it's a type of terrace.
My definition is for Australia NZ and South Africa.
Interesting! It seems it historically refers to housing in dense city areas that aren't apartments. I don't think my idea of townhouses as suburban detached houses built on small subdivided backyards really aligns too much with any of the definitions, though you're right that the historical US definition is sort of similar.
Now I'm wondering what to call detached houses on subdivided sections. The ones where the house almost fills the whole section.
Just, houses? Or maybe "infill houses"?
In new builds the houses seem to almost fill full sections as well, half the time. Apparently from an investment point of view it maximises value/returns. Kind of sucks from a liking to play on the lawn point of view though.
Haha I guess the house itself isn't the differentiating point, it's the section it's on, so maybe 'houses' is right.
Land is super expensive at the moment (you know, over the last generation or so), so it makes sense that minimising the land use means higher profits for developers. In theory, actions like Auckland have done should make land more available and therefore cheaper (supply and demand), but there is probably a factor of where new builds are going too. It makes sense to build houses where people want to live, but this means higher demand for the space which means higher density housing makes sense.
It totally makes sense in our cities. I think the investment part is sort of warping things a bit outside that. It's really noticeable in new builds in coastal towns where many of them are holiday homes that sit empty a lot and there's still plenty of land. I know a town that has under 60% occupancy and all the new parts have that big house to land ratio.
I don't get out much so I haven't noticed developments in holiday destinations! Maybe people don't want a big lawn in a holiday home, because they won't be around to mow it?
I only notice because I drive through these places on my way to visit family. The area I grew up has sort of turned into a bit of a resort area. It's kind of sad because a bunch of the family houses are vacant and the area's locals find it difficult to get housing.
Maybe people don't want a big lawn, true. It might be a cultural shift because they are less active with boats or outdoor stuff than when we were kids? The lawns and maintenance gets done by contractors and there are also companies that manage your bach if you want to put it on air bnb.
"Townhouses" with garages like that set sideways on the lot require an absolute minimum width of about 40' (car storage + car turning radius) which is probably wider than the quadplex I linked (if I had to guess, I'd estimate it at about 32' wide).
I think the more likely reason they're increasingly prevalent is because (misguided) people want that covered/private car storage.
You're probably right. Auckland has really terrible public transport options, like no subway (it is building a tiny loop in the middle of the CBD) and very little in the way of light rail - it doesn't even have a rail link to the international airport which is bizarre in a city of that size and sprawl. People there are obsessed with cars, but unless you live in the inner suburbs it's not that great without one.
There's also a lot more of this sort - these ones have garaging at the back because it's a new build in an outer suburb.