Source: Radio New Zealand
Wayne Brown and councillors met on Tuesday after the government u-turned on 2 million homes for the city. File picture. RNZ/Marika Khabazi
Auckland’s mayor says the city’s oldest suburb can expect intensification after a “long and painful” meeting to mull over how to grow the city.
Councillors met on Tuesday after the government u-turned on plans for 2 million homes for the city.
It last month cut that to 1.6m.
“We’ll send them a letter on the 17th of March,” Wayne Brown said.
“We’ll just be handing them ‘this is the process we’re going to go through’ and if you don’t like it we’ll stick with 2 million,” he told Morning Report.
He was asked what would happen if the government did not like the plan from councillors.
“They’re just the government, and they live in Wellington, and they should just spend their time wandering around the coast picking up the lavatory paper that they put into the harbour,” he said.
“And we’ll carry on running a big city.”
Brown said with 180,000 votes, he represented Aucklanders more than Parliamentarians did.
But he said he was “not really grumpy with the government”.
The back-and-forth on future development in the city has been a divisive debate.
Housing Minister Chris Bishop has previously said he was frustrated by resistance from some for the government’s push for greater intensification.
After pressure from people worried about heritage homes and infrastructure, he announced last month Cabinet had agreed to lower the 2m number.
“We decided on some policies about how we would go about reducing the number from 2 million to 1.6, but we didn’t do anything about implementing it,” Brown said of Tuesday’s meeting.
“We’re not going to actually do any work about that until the government passes the legislation, so we’ve decided some sensible rules.”
Brown said there would be no intensification in suburbs “that haven’t got everything needed” and that are more than 10-kilometres from the central city.
But he said there would be in places with good public transport and infrastructure.
“It’s just sensible, it will end up with a city which looks like a city, not the world’s largest suburb,” the mayor told Morning Report.
Brown said “vocal constituents” had no more influence than local councillors did.
“Parnell has a railway station, bus service, and is on the upgraded sewage area so it will certainly be involved in intensification,” he said.
“Just like Mount Eden, Epsom, Ponsonby, and all the other areas that are close into the city that actually have a lot of it already.
“If you have a look, if you visit Parnell, there’s a multi-storey apartments everywhere, same with Ponsonby where I live, I’m in a multi-storey apartment as we speak so they’re just sensible things make it into a nice city.”
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
