APARTMENTS THREATEN TO TURN INTO GHETTOS

NZ HERALD: Monday May 16, 2005. By Bernard Orsman

Central Auckland is becoming wall-to-wall apartments, with figures showing two out of three new buildings are residential. The Auckland City Council has approved 123 new buildings or major building alterations since 1998, of which 83 are apartments, figures released to the Herald under the Official Information Act show. Of the 83 apartment buildings, only a 316-unit apartment tower in Cook St and a 94-unit in Sale St were notified for public scrutiny. Council planners decided not to give the public a say on the other 81 projects.

Many critics, including Mayor Dick Hubbard, say a council-led push for high-density development has led to scores of ugly apartment towers which will become ghetto areas. The number of apartments in central Auckland has exploded, from 1500 in the early 1990s to 10,000 and another 4000 under construction. The council is projecting a central-city population of 26,470 by 2013.

City planning group manager John Duthie, who has just been promoted to the council's top planning job, defended his staff's decision to rubber-stamp so many poorly designed apartment towers without public scrutiny. At the time they complied with bulk, height and other controls that paid little attention to design matters, he said.

In the past two years the council had established an urban design panel to vet new central-city projects and put the brakes on tiny apartments by imposing a minimum 30sq m size. The new council was committing nearly $1 million to beef up its urban design expertise and Mr Hubbard had set up an urban design taskforce to halt shonky development and bad architecture.

Nigel Cook, of the architectural lobby group Urban Auckland, was critical of the council's planning department, saying it had a culture of servicing the needs of the developers without including the public. The apartments along Nelson St, Hobson St and Union St on the city fringe were "simply barbaric".

"How you can justify putting up one block of flats next to another block of flats next to another block of flats so that nobody except the one downhill can see is beyond me," Mr Cook said.

Urban Auckland took the council to the High Court last year and won a case to overturn a non-notified resource consent for a 36-storey apartment block on the site of the historic St James Theatre in Queen St. In a landmark ruling, Justice Patrick Keane said the council could not ignore the design for one of the largest buildings in Auckland. The urban design panel has looked at revised plans for the tower and said it is too big for the area.

Mr Hubbard said the taskforce was addressing the issue of greater public involvement in urban design issues and how that might fit into an idea of rewarding developers who exceeded minimum design and quality standards.