Auckland Housing Accord reviewed

Overall, the council met the target for 39,000 sites and dwellings consented within the three year period of the Accord. To date 5,527 dwellings issued with building consents and 3,105 dwellings have been completed within SHAs as of June 2017.

Councillor Chris Darby, Chair of the Planning Committee, says overall the Accord has been positive for Auckland significantly increasing the amount and speed of land supply and establishing a strong relationship with central government on housing issues.

“There should be no more questions about a shortage of land being supplied. With the Accord, helped by the Auckland Unitary Plan and Future Urban Land Supply Strategy that job is now done.

“But the Accord also had some oversights. It lacked affordability targets, had affordability criteria making it extremely hard to collect data and lacked requirements for developers to actually build houses once they had a Special Housing Area apply to their land.

“It is time now to build on the lessons of the Accord from the last three years and move forward to get on top of affordability issues in the same way we have with land supply.

“We don’t build houses; consenting is our business but Aucklanders can’t live in consents and so we have a responsibility to find ways to convert these into actual homes for people to live in.

Going forward this is going to be progressed through our on-going collaboration with central government and the private sector on new initiatives and strategies as outlined in the Mayoral Housing Taskforce report.

“We will also continue to very closely monitor a range of housing issues including affordability and homes built, rising rents and house prices to ensure council can do what it can to enable greater housing development across Auckland”, says Councillor Darby.

The digest of decisions made can be found here.