John MacDonald: Thumbs up Christchurch for flipping the bird at the Govt

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

The Christchurch City Council has voted "no" to implementing the Government's new housing intensification policy which will allow three, three-storey properties to be built on a single section.

And voted “no” by quite a significant majority too - ten councillors said “no”, five voted “yes” (that included the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor), one councillor abstained and another one wasn’t there for the vote.

Of course, it is government policy but remember it has the backing of the National Party too - which joined forces with Labour last year to make this thing happen.

Right from the outset, I’ve thought that it’s a dog of an idea. Basically because it’s a one-size fits all approach to address a problem we don’t necessarily have in Christchurch.

But even though we don’t have the problem of nowhere to build houses, the Government thinks we should be squeezing as many houses as possible onto every bit of land - and I say “houses” quite loosely because if you’ve got three, three-storey structures on one section they’re not going to be houses are they?

I think the people opposed to intensification who were at the Council meeting yesterday should get a prize for the best protest slogan I’ve seen in a long time - “Stop Daylight Robbery”.

Which is exactly what this intensification business is all about. Stealing people's daylight by allowing monstrosities to be built next door, without any form of notification.

Which means the first you or I would know something was happening next door, would be when the builders turned up and started pegging out the section.

And there’d be nothing you could do about it - apart from watch your daylight be robbed from right under your nose as three, three-story places went up over the fence.

Shady - in so many ways.

And so yesterday, Christchurch city councillors had to decide whether they would agree to enforce this new government policy - or not.

Ten of them voted “no” - or as one councillor, Melanie Coker, put it, they flipped the bird at the Government.

You may have heard Housing Minister Megan Woods saying on Newstalk ZB that she wants to see what analysis the Christchurch City Council has used to get to the decision it made yesterday.

She says Christchurch has had the second-highest rent rises in the country and more places need to be built.

Which might be a fair argument, but there’s no way I can accept a situation where developers could cram three, three-storey properties on any section in any part of town. That would just be nuts.

Yes, the central city is a prime location for more intense housing. And we’re seeing it already with the apartment developments that are happening.

But Somerfield, Bishopdale, St Albans - any part of town where people live because they want a bit of space for the kids to run around or they want to grow vegetables and they want light and sunshine, why on earth would any councillor vote in favour of that being ruined by this holus-bolus approach the Government wants to take?

So a brilliant move yesterday by the ten councillors who voted “no”.

The risk now is that the Government will choose to appoint commissioners or a Crown manager to take over and enforce the policy in Christchurch.

Megan Woods refused to say today whether she’d be doing that. She was banging on about taking a mature approach and wanting to see the numbers behind yesterday’s decision.

What the numbers won’t show is how much of an influence the upcoming elections had on how councillors voted yesterday. Because at a council meeting last week, one of the people opposed to the policy told councillors that the way they vote could be a deciding factor in their success or otherwise in next month’s local body elections.

So, of course, that would have been a factor in how councillors voted. But I actually don’t care about that because, until that vote went through yesterday, I wasn’t sure whether the city council would have the fortitude to tell the Government where to go with this policy.

And I’m delighted that it has.

Yes, in the long run, it may not make one scrap of difference - especially if the Government gets all heavy on it and goes down the track of appointing commissioners or a Crown manager to take over and make the policy happen here in Christchurch.

But that, as far as I’m concerned, is a risk well worth taking.

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