Both Labour and National have agreed to work together to solve housing supply problems.
Today Housing Minister Megan Woods and Environment Minister David Parker together with the Leader of the Opposition, Judith Collins announced the Housing Supply Bill which they say will allow as many as 105,500 new homes to be built in under 10 years.
A key feature of the Bill is that three homes of up to three stories can be built on site without a resource consent.
“In January, I wrote to the Prime Minister proposing that National and Labour work on a bipartisan and urgent solution to the housing crisis,” the National leader said. “As I said then, our resource consent process makes it too difficult to build more housing in New Zealand.”
Collins said that in April, she “presented a draft Bill that would have required local authorities to zone more space for new housing, drastically cutting consent requirements for those wishing to build new dwellings whether through intensification or greenfields development”.
Two months later in June the housing and environment ministers replied with a letter advising that “they saw merit in my proposal to increase the supply of residential housing”.
“They [the ministers] welcomed National’s contribution to further development of policy to allow a serious uplift in new housing in urban areas,” Collins said.
“This legislation takes power away from town planners and gives it back to the people they serve. It will allow our cities to develop and grow, with a range of housing types to suit people at different stages of life,” said National’s housing spokeswoman Nicola Willis.
Parker said that new “medium density residential standards (MDRS) will enable landowners to build up to three homes of up to three storeys on most sites up to 50% maximum coverage of the site without the need for a resource consent.
This announcement ends the stand off for New Zealand’s housing crisis which has endured for decades.
