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

While councils will need to include sufficient development capacity to meet housing growth targets in their regulatory plans, it’s unlikely that councils could immediately service that level of growth with adequate transport and three waters infrastructure. This may mean that councils identify residential development capacity in their plans that is not ready to be developed.

The RM EAG recommended developing an agile land release mechanism to enable development areas to be brought online through a streamlined process. It also recommended that where growth areas are identified in a spatial plan and then zoned as an indicative urban zone in the regulatory plan, that land can be released for development without a formal plan change. To achieve this, the regulatory plan could be required to specify triggers for release such as infrastructure availability, developing and agreeing a detailed structure plan, or land price indicators.

We’re exploring how this system could work in practice, such as:

• what should be enabled on the land prior to comprehensive development
• what criteria could be used to determine when land can be released
• what process could be used for the release of land
• when decisions on appropriate zoning patterns (and other factors currently commonly undertaken in structure planning) would take place
• the status of land-use that would be necessary for capacity to count towards a council’s housing growth target
• how the infrastructure constraint (and the impact on the ability to develop land) is communicated to plan users
• whether the same mechanism should be used for both brownfield and greenfield areas.