Auckland Council votes to scale back its housing density plan and drop 20 local centres

Auckland Council has voted to scale back the largest rezoning in the city’s history, keeping apartment heights around train stations and frequent bus routes while removing six-storey zoning from more than 20 smaller local centres.

Councillors backed the revised version of Plan Change 120 on 21 July by 17 votes to five, RNZ reported. The decision sends the amended rules out for public submissions rather than settling them, so the argument about how tall Auckland is allowed to build has months left to run.

Plan Change 120 is the council’s response to central government legislation that sets a minimum amount of housing the city must zone for. That minimum was cut from roughly two million homes to 1.4 million, and the council has spent this year working out where to land above the new floor. The version now going to consultation zones for somewhere between 1.5 and 1.7 million homes, well short of the original plan but above what the law strictly demands.

Mayor Wayne Brown, who has argued for more intensification rather than less, described the outcome as a middle path. “The option we’ve gone with is a compromise between those who wanted us to do less and those, like me, who wanted us to do more,” he said in the council’s announcement of the decision.

The practical effect is easiest to understand by looking at where the zoning survives and where it does not. Taller buildings, of roughly 10 to 15 storeys, are retained around train stations within about 10 kilometres of the city centre. Apartment zoning also stays along frequent bus corridors inside that same radius and around the larger town centres. Beyond the 10 kilometre mark, heights step back down to six storeys. Meadowbank is treated as an exception and capped at six storeys because of its valley setting and the constraints on getting in and out of it.

What changes most is the treatment of small suburban centres. Six-storey zoning is being lifted from more than 20 of them, a list that 1News reported includes Albany Village, Balmoral, Blockhouse Bay, Botany Junction, Chatswood, Clendon, Dawsons Road, Eden Valley, Greenlane West, Grey Lynn, Hobsonville, Jervois Road in Herne Bay, Kelston, Kepa Road and Eastridge, Lynfield, Mairangi Bay, Māngere East, Meadowbank, Meadowlands, Mount Roskill, Mount Wellington and Te Atatū South. Those are the shopping strips and neighbourhood hubs where the earlier plan would have allowed apartment blocks to rise directly above the dairy and the chemist.

For most Aucklanders, nothing on their own street moves. The council says about 85 percent of the city’s urban area is unaffected by the proposed changes. The plan also strengthens rules for land exposed to flooding and other natural hazards, a response to the storms of recent years that made the cost of building in the wrong place very visible.

The numbers attached to the decision are worth reading carefully, because zoning capacity is not the same thing as houses. Planning Committee chairperson Richard Hills made the point directly, saying “housing capacity is not a target for how many homes will actually be built”. A capacity figure measures what the rules would theoretically permit if every landowner in every zone chose to build to the maximum, which never happens. Hills also set out the reasoning behind keeping density near transport, saying “housing should be built where the infrastructure is, especially transport and water”.

Council chief economist Gary Blick has put figures on the trade-off. His assessment of the scaled-back option is that Auckland would get about 13 percent fewer new homes over the next decade than the fuller version of the plan would have delivered. On prices, his estimate is that future house prices under the option councillors adopted would sit around 3 to 5 percent below where they would be under existing zoning rules. In earlier advice from June, reported by NZ Adviser, Blick had estimated the more ambitious scenario could push future prices 5 to 8 percent lower, with economic benefits worth between $700 million and $3.9 billion over ten years depending on which option was chosen.

Percentages of that size are modest against the scale of Auckland prices, and they describe a difference from a future path rather than a fall from today’s level. Nobody is forecasting cheaper houses next year because of a zoning map. What the estimates do show is the direction of the lever. More permitted building capacity near transport tends to take some heat out of prices over time, and pulling capacity back gives a little of that heat away.

The counter argument is that a zoning map is not the only thing that matters. Streets laid out a century ago do not automatically gain the pipes, the road capacity and the school places that six storeys of new neighbours would require, which is the reasoning behind keeping the height where the infrastructure already exists.

Aucklanders now get another turn. Public submissions open in late August and run for about four weeks, through the council’s AK Have Your Say website. People who made submissions on the earlier version of Plan Change 120 keep the standing of what they have already lodged and can add to it rather than starting again. After submissions close, an independent hearings panel reviews them and holds public hearings, with final council decisions expected around the middle of 2027.

That timeline means the rules that shape what can be built in Auckland for the next generation will be settled by a council elected after this year’s local body elections, working from evidence gathered under the current one. Landowners, developers and residents who have been waiting on a settled answer since the government changed the minimum capacity rules will be waiting a while yet.

Do you live in one of the centres losing its six-storey zoning, or near a station keeping it? Tell us what you think the change means for your neighbourhood in the comments below.

This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂