Going for Housing Growth: Providing for urban development in the new resource management system

While housing growth targets are intended to provide an abundance of opportunities for development, it’s important that the capacity requirements are also informed by indicators of how land markets are functioning in practice.

Cabinet has previously agreed to set new requirements that price indicators (such as urban fringe land price differentials) do not deteriorate (and ideally improve) over time.

One way to do this could be to build in requirements that council planning decisions are responsive to a suite of price efficiency indicators, which would be measured and published by the Te Tūāpapa Kura Kāinga. This suite could include measures of urban fringe land price differentials, price-cost ratios and land ownership concentration.

These indicators would inform whether council plans are enabling enough development capacity to support competitive urban land markets and, if not, trigger a requirement for councils to enable more capacity in their plans.