Auckland’s scaled back housing plan gives Howick residents part of what they fought for, three weeks after the Local Board halted its own meeting so the community could be heard.
The Board adjourned its 25 June meeting “to give the community a chance to address the local board meeting in public forum” before settling its position on Plan Change 120.
When the meeting resumed on 2 July, eight speakers addressed the Board on the plan change.
Laurie Slee spoke for the Cockle Bay association, Janet Dickson and Peter Bankers for the Howick Residents and Ratepayers Association, Derek Shortt and Chris O’Loughlin for Bucklands Eastern Beach, and residents Andries Popping, Paul Taylor and Geoffrey Thompson spoke on their own account.
The Cockle Bay association, long a leading voice on Howick planning matters, set out its position in a formal submission written by Slee.
“This is not NIMBY-ism,” the submission says of the suburb it describes as zoned for apartments along sixteen streets. “It is the amenity and character that people value.”
It argues that “the infrastructure simply does not exist to service the proposed intensification”, citing Watercare reporting that has upgrades to the local sewer network not scheduled until 2037.
And on the assumption that apartment dwellers would manage without cars, it says “expecting people to cycle or walk (or even use not-frequent public transport) is to live in a world of delusion”.
After hearing the speakers, the Board passed feedback it says “captures and represents its community’s position on the matter”.
On Tuesday the Council’s Policy, Planning and Development Committee made the decisions all of that was meant to influence, and east Auckland’s scorecard is mixed.
Cockle Bay is the clearest winner, with six storey zoning removed from the bus routes between Howick and Botany through Sandspit, Litten and Millhouse Roads, the very streets the association had fought over, and from Botany to Manukau.
Officials’ reason was regional rather than local, with apartment zoning along bus routes kept within 10 kilometres of the city centre and dropped everywhere further out.
Howick Local Board’s other requests did not land
Its headline ask, moving apartment zoning off Howick Village’s northern slopes from Mellons Bay Road to Sale Street and off Ridge Road near Stockade Hill, and putting it around Meadowlands instead, was declined.
Council staff told the committee that unpicking Howick’s town centre zoning alone “would start to beg the question, why not many other town centres?”
Meadowlands went the other way entirely, with proposed intensification around smaller local centres removed across the region.
The Board had recommended Bucklands Beach Peninsula “be returned to single house zone due to access constraints and infrastructure concerns”, but the committee’s package simply reverts the wider suburbs to the current rules adopted in 2016, leaving the peninsula’s existing zoning in place.
And the Board’s request that officers investigate reviewing Howick Village’s town centre classification, which its resolution calls “undesirable and erroneous”, was not taken up, with town centres keeping their proposed upzoning region wide.
Ward councillor Maurice Williamson, who pressed the Board’s case at the committee, told colleagues what he would say to residents: “I’ll say, you guys should be trying to go to the independent hearings panel and see if you can convince them.”
That panel is now the community’s next stop, and existing submissions, Cockle Bay’s included, keep their standing.
Public submissions on the amended plan change are expected to open in late August and run for four weeks, with hearings to follow and the Council’s final decisions due in mid 2027.
