Auckland Council signs off Unitary Plan

The country's biggest town planning exercise is now complete, with the Auckland Council signing off its oddly-named Unitary Plan.

It's oddly named because the creation of a single development blueprint has been the biggest and most contentious task undertaken by the council since it was formed in 2010 by amalgamating eight previous local bodies.

The Unitary Plan merges dozens of past planning rulebooks and, crucially, re-zones the city to provide more higher-density housing, close to transport, for population growth of up to 1 million by 2040.

The job was written into legislation creating the council, and has taken much of the past five years.

The council proposed a plan just before the 2013 local body elections, and a government-appointed panel has conducted 249 days of hearings, last month recommending a rewritten version to the council.

Some communities strongly opposed higher density zonings, while supporters argued that higher density and smaller, better located homes would make the city more affordable.

Councillors this afternoon wound up four days of working through the final version of the plan.

Deputy mayor Penny Hulse said, while the plan wasn't perfect, it would enable the building of homes that were more affordable.

"It's certainly going to deliver an awful lot more homes than you could have built before the plan was finalised," she said.

"The other thing is it allows for terraced housing, for apartments, and different kinds of homes, and they're simply going to be more affordable than the standalone houses that we've got now."

The Unitary Plan makes many changes, most significantly to the type of housing that can be built.

• It locks in the goal of keeping up to 70 percent of future growth within the urban area, and up to 40 percent in surrounding rural areas and towns, adding capacity for 422,000 new homes.
• Far less of Auckland's urban residential area will be restricted to single homes on sections: just 22 percent.
• 39.2 percent will be zoned Mixed Housing Suburban, generally two-storey townhouses.
• 19.8 percent is zoned Mixed Housing Urban - townhouse developments up to three storeys.
• In those zones, there is no restriction to the number of dwellings that can be built on a single site.
• 6.5 percent of the residential area is zoned for higher-rise apartments and terrace housing.
• A blanket, temporary check on developments in neighbourhoods of pre-1944 homes has been removed from the plan, and replaced by more carefully researched and limited "character" areas.
• Proposals to require 10 percent of housing developments to be "retained affordable homes" was dropped, in the majority belief that other aspects of the plan better deliver affordable homes.
• The council re-instated rural zonings on two heritage volcanic fields in south Auckland, including Crater Hill, which the panel zoned for housing.
• The council is required to maintain at least seven years of ready-to-build housing land, served by bulk infrastructure that developers can tap into.

The government is keen for the plan to be implemented, believing the zoning for more dwellings might accelerate home building, and ease both Auckland's housing shortage, and steadily rising prices.

The Unitary Plan will be formally notified on 19 August, the deadline set by the government when the process began.

Appeals of legal challenges must be lodged by 16 September, and any part of the plan which is challenged will remain unresolved until a ruling by the Environment Court.

Any part of the plan not appealed will come into force on 16 September.