Auckland Council’s Self-Defeating Housing Strategy: 7 February 2025

Auckland Council’s Self-Defeating Housing Strategy

Auckland Council claims their development contributions (DCs) don’t affect house prices. But their own 2018 affordable housing report illustrates a contradiction:

🤔 The Contradiction:

Council’s housing report identifies high development costs as a major barrier to affordable housing.

Yet they’re wanting charging DCs up to $120,000 per dwelling this year in affordable areas like Glen Innes (plus more when water growth charges are added).

Their report specifically warns that high costs make affordable housing projects unviable.

Council’s housing report uses California to show how high development costs triple the subsidy needed for affordable housing. Yet they’re adding massive DCs to Auckland’s already high development costs (I note they like to use US examples).

The Strategy vs Reality: Council’s housing report recommends:

✅ “Cost-offsetting incentives” for affordable housing
✅ Increasing lower-cost housing supply
✅ Supporting affordable housing projects

But their DC policy does the opposite by:

✅ Adding huge costs to development
✅ Making affordable projects less viable
✅ Delaying new housing supply

It’s like saying you want to make swimming lessons available to everyone while escalating the costs to build that teaching swimming pool, not building it for 28 years because it costs so much and then making the houses start paying for it today.

⏳ Time for Change:

Council needs to align their DC policy with their affordable housing goals.

✅ They need to allow private partnerships for infrastructure and let other solutions be used.
✅ They need to allocate growth costs proportionately instead of loading them onto the compact small brownfield homes.

You can’t solve an affordability crisis while making it more expensive to build homes when you could change the approach.