‘Intensification on steroids’: Nelson housing plan rejected

Nelson’s ability to provide enough homes over the next 30 years is now uncertain after the city council’s housing density plans were largely rejected.

For almost two years, Nelson City Council has been working on Plan Change 29 – a controversial overhaul of its planning rules to make it easier to build high-density housing across the city.

But many of the council’s goals have since fallen over after the hearing panel that oversaw the process recommended that most of the plan change’s proposals be rejected.

Nelson’s elected members accepted the panel’s recommendation today which saw many elements of the plan formally scrapped.

Opposition to the plan was widespread and vocal as submitters sought to protect their sunlight access, and councillors’ commentaries often declared the result a win for residents.

Mayor Nick Smith described the plan as “intensification on steroids” and said the council needed to learn from the “strong kickback” from the public and engage earlier with the community in the future.

Included in the scrapped measures were residential zones and overlays that would have allowed buildings of up to six storeys to be built on some sites without a resource consent.

The changes that weren’t rejected will focus intensification in the inner city and city fringe, and most natural hazard provisions were also kept.

Councillor Pete Rainey said the changes for the central city were a “really positive step in the right direction” but added that “the issues facing the city are not going to go away. We need to do something about them”.

More than 1200 households in need of affordable housing – survey

A recent Nelson Tasman Housing Trust survey showed that 1222 households in the region were currently in need of affordable housing.

Under the council’s revised planning rules which have now largely been rejected, the number of commercially feasible dwellings over the next 30 years was expected to climb by 23,450 for attached homes and 6825 for detached dwellings.

But the current planning rules only enabled 6500 attached and 3175 detached dwellings over the same period.

Now that most of the new rules have been rejected, council staff were unsure how many extra dwellings would be feasible.

Even though the changes for the inner city and city fringe were approved, they’re only expected to provide “relatively modest” boost for capacity.

Housing demand was still expected to be met until 2027, but council staff were uncertain if the limited changes agreed to today would be able to meet Nelson’s housing need over the next 30 years.

The council had originally proposed the planning changes to adequately cater for growth as required by the 2020 National Policy Statement on Urban Development.

However, the hearing panel’s recommendation to reject large parts of the council’s plan change essentially boiled down to the proposal not adequately considering urban form and amenity value provisions that were outlined in the council’s own 1997 regional policy statement.

That determination from the panel would be embarrassing for the council as it had paused work on updating its regional policy statement in 2021, which had been drafted and would have likely allowed many of the intensification proposals to go ahead.

The pause was attributed to ongoing uncertainty from central government about Resource Management Act reform.

Not the end of intensification

Several councillors said the fault lay with the elected members of the current and previous councils who pushed on with the process despite the uncertainty.

Smith added that the process had shown the “fundamental problem” of the Resource Management Act, which needed to be reformed.

“Despite hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment, and some of the very best experts in the RMA… we’ve been tripped up by provisions that date back to 1997.”

But despite the hurdles, elected members were clear that today’s rejection of these specific higher-density zones was not the end of intensification in Nelson.

The region’s future development strategy expects about 78% of Nelson’s long-term growth to be accommodated by intensification.

“We need to engage strongly with our community to shape future work, whilst acknowledging that status quo is not a static option,” said deputy mayor Rohan O’Neill-Stevens.

“Together, we can find a way forward that we can all be proud of.”

The decisions are expected to be formally notified to the public on Tuesday, starting a 30-working day period where appeals can be lodged to the Environment Court.

Approved changes:

Rejected changes:

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