Matthew Bai
We’ve got a news item from the Bay of Plenty this week- Ōmokoroa residents were presented with four options for the future location of schools, a town centre, community hub and recreational reserves. This is in addition to questions over planning decisions relating to the conversion of productive, fertile land into residential areas in order to accommodate population growth.
Also in the news this week, Chanda have purchased more development land on Auckland’s North Shore, and the issue of Auckland’s viewshafts has re-emerged.
Plans have been released to help shape Ōmokoroa’s future development. Ōmokoroa residents were presented with four options for the future location of schools, a town centre, community hub and recreational reserves at a public open day yesterday. The options detailed rough locations of new land to be subdivided and identified the areas for medium density and rural residential housing as well as alternative locations for industrial areas.
The detailed options are the next phase of the proposed Structure Plan for the area between the railway line and State Highway 2 which is expected to support a community of more than 12,000 residents by 2060. Plans to accommodate the future growth include ensuring a variety of section sizes and types of housing are provided, including one- and two-bedroom homes, townhouses and traditional stand-alone houses.
The Western Bay of Plenty District Council’s senior planner, Andries Cloete, said Ōmokoroa’s growing area needed adequate land for industrial areas that will provide for the community’s needs as well as employment opportunities for residents. “We would like people to live and work in Ōmokoroa,” he said.
Space for cemeteries and what was being done to fix SH2 were also concerns raised by residents which Cloete said were being considered. He said once the preferred option was signed off by the council, a detailed plan would be brought back to public consultation early next year. The entire process could take about two years.
Council resource management manager Philip Martelli said people were most interested to know if there would be space for new schooling. Martelli said the council and the Ministry of Education were looking at options to cater for the projected population growth as part of the structure planning process. “Timing of any land acquisition and school establishment will be determined by projected demand and the ministry’s funding priorities,” he said.
Ōmokoroa resident Marilyn Smith said she did not expect to see so much residential land, but she was glad to see schools were planned for the area to accommodate new families moving into the area.
Federated Farmers Bay of Plenty provincial president Darryl Jensen has expressed concern regarding the conversion of productive farmland into intensive residential uses. Jensen says the Bay of Plenty must avoid the mistakes made in Auckland’s Pukekohe where valuable production land has been lost to urban development.
“Council planners have to start dealing in reality and not their ideal idea of massive yards for their urban areas. They are going to have to start investing in well-constructed, environmentally friendly apartments. And they have to be well constructed – none of this leaky homes debacle that hit urban areas years ago because of poor decision-making processes”, said Jensen.
The OIO has given approval to Chanda to purchase additional development land in Orewa for the creation of new residential sections. The transaction is valued at $40m (NZD). Dao Yang, Changda’s finance and HR manager based at Albany, said last week that work was well under way to establish sites for new houses on the land where group builders Signature and Golden Homes had bought. The project is Pacific Heights.
“We are creating 574 residential sites,” Yang said of the property at 207 West Hoe Heights. Changda needed OIO consent to buy because the land was classified as sensitive and Yang said it had extensive stands of native bush.
“We’re targeting local people, not Chinese,” Yang said of that project. At their highest point, blocks will rise on the site beside the Vodafone Events Centre up to eight levels facing Great South Rd and Yang said the site was zoned a Special Housing Area so 10 per cent [sic] of homes must be affordable.
Changda set up here after a director travelled to New Zealand as a tourist “and noticed houses needing refurbishment and that Auckland needs more houses,” Yang said.
Planning rules protecting just one view of Mt Eden’s volcanic cone are said to be costing Auckland $1.4 billion in lost development opportunities.
Consultants PWC said the view was seen for just seconds by motorists approaching the Harbour Bridge, and the restriction was limiting both residential and commercial development on the western side of the CBD.
“What we currently see in the city centre is a shadow of what it could be,” said PWC’s director of economics Geoff Cooper.
Cooper said there should be a new discussion about development restrictions imposed by viewshafts protected in the city’s planning blueprint, the Unitary Plan in 2016. “We don’t say the policy should be got rid of, but you could vastly reduce the cost and still retain some of that view,” said Cooper.
He said motorists get to enjoy E10 for only a few seconds, and then have a different view of the cone from further up the harbour bridge. “One option is to rotate the (E10) viewshaft by 4.5 degrees, so motorists can enjoy the view for a similar period of time, while reducing the ‘cost’ by approximately 40%,” he said.
The paper calculated each southbound vehicle crossing the bridge daily was in effect paying $14,000 for the view. E10 is one of 50 viewshafts around Auckland which experts consulted during the Unitary Plan process, and agreed were regionally significant and should be protected. It is a view the council’s consultant landscape architect, Stephen Brown, argued eloquently for the Unitary Plan hearings panel to protect.
“It is a contrasting, but legible and expressive, [sic] component of the city landscape that contributes quite decisively to the signature of Auckland’s CBD,” Brown wrote.
“It touches a very real nerve in relation to the city’s identity and values: of commerce intermingling with lifestyle and of a metropolis than is still largely defined by its relationship with geomorphological features that well and truly outdate the advent of human occupation.
“They (volcanic viewshafts) are also one of the main landscape features that give Auckland its distinctive character,” wrote Roy Brown, a planner with the Auckland Regional Authority in 1976 when the views were first noted in a regional plan.
An Auckland Council report in 2016 on the Unitary Plan recommendations, found E10 resulted in 293,327 square metres of floor space unable to be developed.
Cooper said E10’s impact on land values was marked. “At the viewshaft boundary the land values drop precipitously and across the area of the viewshaft it is a sustained cost – people are able to do a lot less with that land.”
During the Unitary Plan hearings before an independent panel, there was a consensus it was too difficult to try to pin down an economic cost to view protection.