Some Nelson residents see plan change 29 as daylight robbery
Some Nelson residents have opposed a proposed change in planning rules that will enable greater housing intensification, in fear that six-storey apartment blocks will steal the sunlight from homes and ruin the city’s amenity.
But environmental and housing experts slammed the current planning rules as outdated and said housing should accommodate a growing city.
In August, the Nelson City Council gave the go-ahead to progress plan change 29 for public notification, which proposed to introduce three new residential zones allowing for varying levels of housing density, RNZ reported.
Tim Bayly, who initiated the Facebook page Stop Plan 29, labelled it daylight robbery.
“That’s what it is, basically they are stealing our sunlight, and we all came to Nelson because it was the sunniest place in New Zealand, mostly and houses are sold on sunshine and aspect, so the most expensive houses have good sunshine and good views and so forth.
“Now, that could be gone tomorrow and the thing that gets me is you have no rights... the neighbour can build [according to the zone rules] and you get no consultation, no nothing. The first thing you know [about] that two, three, or six storey buildings going up next to you is the bulldozers showing up on Monday morning.”
Under plan change 29, three residential zones will be introduced: a general residential zone which will permit up to three residential units with the height of two storeys, a medium-density residential zone with up to three units of up to three storeys, and a high-density residential zone with up to three units of six storeys, which can be built without resource consent if they met the required conditions, RNZ reported.
Bayly said it was not intensification that he was against – it’s the approach.
“I don’t think it’s the way forward, you don’t hand over a city carte blanche to developers to look after because they do not build good stuff... they will build stuff that makes them the most money and that's the issue here, if you want really good planning you have to have good community input,” he said.
Steve Webster, another Nelson resident, echoed the sentiment and was worried about the timeframe for feedback and the lack of engagement with the community.
“We have 27 working days to get public submissions in, the documentation is a couple of thousand pages or so, there’s no time to try and look at the positives in it, it’s just trying to find the negatives in it so we can stop those aspects before we destroy the city,” Webster said.
Webster felt the proposed plan did not have the best interests of the Nelson residents at heart and he wanted to see the council work with the community.
Following feedback, the council held a public meeting at short notice, to allow people to talk about the proposed changes.
Mandy Bishop, Nelson City Council environmental management group manager, said the 20-year-old planning rules have to change to deal with the city’s growth.
“Nelson hasn’t got a lot of flat land to spread out on, so our main avenue for accommodating growth is intensification – both within the city centre and alongside public transport routes,” Bishop said. “It is just a proposal at the moment and we're keen to hear people's feedback as to whether we have got this right or there are some areas where people suggest we might do it differently.”
Bishop said the council needed to have a 30-year plan outlining the future growth under the government’s national policy statement for urban development. This was the Nelson’s Future Development plan adopted by the council in August.
“It’s looking ahead for our region to try and enable a supply of a variety of housing choices, we don’t expect this to be uptaken and change the scene overnight... it has the potential to change neighbourhoods as we know them, particularly close to the centres, along public transport lines and within walking distance to commercial and community facilities,” she said.
Carrie Mozena, Nelson Tasman Housing Trust director, expressed the organisation’s support of the plan change, saying the region needed greater intensification.
“Nelson continues to have a serious affordable housing problem and frankly, anything that over time will help both community housing providers as well as private property developers deliver a greater intensification, will help the community long term,” Mozena said.
More than a hundred people are in the trust’s waitlist and each year, the trust fields hundreds more enquiries about housing.
According to its most recent six-monthly survey, 600 households across Nelson and Tasman were looking for an affordable place to live.
“The pressure to provide more homes for a growing population is being felt up and down New Zealand, Nelson is not alone by any means, but the reality is that it's just no longer practical, in urban centres the size of Nelson or larger, for everyone to be able to live on a quarter acre section anymore, it's just not practical anymore,” Mozena said. “Nelson needs more homes, and we can't just do it spreading out, we have to go up.”
Kindra Douglas, of Community Action Nelson, said the city clearly needed housing intensification for some time.
“It’s been talked about for as long as I can remember, the future development strategy was very clear that overall, there was a sense we don’t want to go out sprawling because we don’t have the traffic infrastructure, we don’t want to create greater congestion but also people want to live in a city centre now in a different way than we might have even 10 or 15 years ago,” Douglas said.
She said the plan presented exciting growth opportunities.
“We’ve got a whole bunch of amazingly good architects and designers and development people who really want to help make a difference in our city and I’d be really sad to hear people saying no, just don’t do it, because the council has already got a good mandate to proceed with this and every other good city in the world is doing exactly that,” Douglas said.
The proposed changes are open for feedback until Sept. 19, RNZ reported.
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