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Episode 81: How New Zealand Passed Its Ambitious Zoning Reforms with Eleanor West

Eleanor West, "Up-zoning New Zealand: the localisation of a globally mobile policy idea (Policy paper no. 003)"

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Episode Summary: In a previous episode we discussed Auckland’s unprecedented upzoning and its effect on housing production and land prices. This time we’re joined by Eleanor West to talk about the political, social, and economic conditions that made the reforms possible — not only in Auckland, but across New Zealand.

Abstract: This article presents a case study exploring the development of two up-zoning policies recently introduced in New Zealand: the National Policy Statement on Urban Development’ 2020 which requires local authorities in major urban areas to raise building height limits within walkable catchments of urban centres and along rapid transit corridors; and the ‘Medium Density Residential Standards’ 2021 which require these local authorities to allow three homes of up to three storeys on any section by right. These two policies are exceptional as they are a rare example of a central government directing zoning interventions at the national scale, and they were both initially introduced with bi-partisan support. Applying the lens of policy mobilities, I examine the process through which ‘up-zoning’, as a globally mobile policy, was successfully localised in New Zealand, by tracing the evolution and circulation of a broader policy idea – ‘relaxing land use regulations’ – from its initial emergence circa 2008, through the years leading up to these recent up-zoning policies. Drawing from interviews with various policy actors – including politicians, civil servants, urban activists, economists, and journalists – I develop insights on what it is about the local socio-political context that enabled ‘up-zoning’ to take hold in New Zealand when it has struggled elsewhere.

Show notes:

  • “’Up-zoning’ is an urban planning policy phenomena that has been sweeping the globe in recent years – or sweeping the Anglosphere, at least. Usually motivated by housing affordability concerns in high-demand cities, up-zoning proponents advocate for the relaxation of restrictive land-use regulations (LURs) to enable higher density development and induce market-led housing supply. However, in many countries and at various levels of governance, attempts to introduce such policies have proven to be politically fraught – often met with strong NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) backlash from existing residents.”
  • “New Zealand – a country with relatively low density cities and one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the world (Burn-Murdoch, 2023; Cox, 2023)  – has been at the forefront of this up-zoning movement, recently introducing two policies that have been met with international acclaim (West & Garlick, 2023): the ‘National Policy Statement on Urban Development’ 2020 (NPS-UD) requires local authorities in major urban areas to raise building height limits within walkable catchments of urban centres and along rapid transit corridors (and abolish minimum car parking requirements); and the ‘Medium Density Residential Standards’ 2021  (MDRS) require these local authorities to allow three homes of up to three storeys on any section by right.”
  • “These two policies are exceptional for two reasons. First, they are a rare example of a central government directing zoning interventions at the national scale, overriding local planning control and circumventing NIMBYism. Second, despite the politically unpalatable nature of such policies, both were initially introduced by the centre-left Labour-government with bi-partisan support from the centre-right National Party. Although political pressures have since seen the National Party withdraw support for the broadly applying MDRS, both parties remain committed to the more targeted NPS-UD, and indeed to the general premise of relaxing LURs (West & Garlick, 2023). The unusual nature of this New Zealand case warrants closer attention. In this article, I draw from interviews with politicians, civil servants, activists, and other actors to explore the historical development of these two policies.”
  • “Up-zoning as a policy position is often associated with the growing, global YIMBY (yes-in-my-backyard) movement, thought to have originated in San Francisco in the early 2010s in response to a mounting housing affordability crisis, driven by growing demand and insufficient supply of new homes (Dougherty, 2021; McCormick, 2017). However, as I demonstrate, New Zealand has its own history with up-zoning – and with the broader policy idea of ‘relaxing LURs’ (see: Fischel, 2015; Glaeser et al., 2005) – that stretches back at least as far. I trace the evolution of this policy idea from its emergence in New Zealand circa 2008, over a series of experimental, small-scale test-cases under the National-government (2008-2017), through to the NPS-UD and the MDRS introduced under the Labour-government (2017-2023). Applying the lens of policy mobilities, I develop understandings of the processes through which globally mobile policies (like up-zoning) are localised, offering insights on what it is about the local context in New Zealand that enabled up-zoning to take hold here when it has struggled elsewhere.”
  • “This article draws from twenty-eight in-depth interviews (R=23-81 min; M=60 min) conducted between September 2023 and March 2024 with a diverse range of policy actors (table 1), and from my own experiences as an affordable housing activist  and onetime policy advisor at the Ministry for Housing and Urban Development (MHUD) . Following Peck and Theodore (2012), I aimed to capture a broad range of insider and outsider perspectives: sampling participants first within my personal networks – based on my own insider knowledge of individuals’ roles in the ‘local ‘policy ecology’ responsible for shaping and influencing (directly and indirectly) policy-making’ (Borén & Young, 2021, p.556) – then via snowballing as I ‘studied through’ (McCann & Ward, 2012) and ‘followed the policy’ (Peck & Theodore, 2012).”
  • “In an effort to mitigate the subject-bias associated with interviewing (Temenos & Ward, 2018), I additionally draw from official documentation of the policy process (including briefings, Cabinet papers, and reports released under the Official Information Act), transcripts of parliamentary debates, other ancillary texts, media articles, and various websites, to triangulate and corroborate findings.”
  • “The idea of relaxing LURs emerged in New Zealand circa 2008. Murphy (2014) contends that this idea was transferred into New Zealand via reports by ‘Demographia’, disseminated by figures within the National Party. However, my interviewees report another origin. While most could not recall when or how this idea first emerged, several referred to a seminal paper by New Zealand academics which found strong impacts of Auckland city’s urban growth boundary on land (and therefore house) prices (Grimes & Liang, 2007, 2009), surprising many and sparking new interest in LURs and urban economics – with a particular focus on enabling growth ‘out’ (rather than ‘up’).”
  • “Regardless of the precise (extra-)local origin, the emergence of this idea coincided with the Global Financial Crisis and the election of a National-led government, instigating a shift in the focus of housing affordability policy within the central government from demand-side to supply-side interventions. Over their nine-year term (2008-2017), the National-government proceeded to ‘problematise’ the planning system as inefficient and unresponsive (Gurran et al., 2014; Murphy, 2014, 2016; White & Nandedkar, 2021), experimenting with relaxing LURs over a series of four small-scale test-cases that interviewees identified as important sources for the later up-zoning policies. First, the rebuild of Christchurch city following a major earthquake in 2011 … Second, the Auckland Unitary Plan (AUP) … The third source case was the Special Housing Areas initiative, launched by central government in 2013 … The fourth source case was the National Policy Statement on Urban Development Capacity 2016 (NPS-UDC), the predecessor of the first up-zoning policy (the NPS-UD).”
  • “In 2010, central government forcibly amalgamated eight local authorities in New Zealand’s largest metropolitan area – home to a third of New Zealanders – to form Auckland Council (Asquith et al., 2021). This new council was then required to draft a Unitary Plan: a multi-step process eventually completed in 2016 that saw approximately 75% of the city’s land area up-zoned (Greenaway-McGrevy & Phillips, 2023; see also: Blakeley, 2015; Donnell, 2022; Imran & Pearce, 2015; McArthur, 2017; Murphy, 2016) … However, housing affordability was not the initial motivation for this up-zoning. Rather, the new council aspired to improve livability and connectivity, reduce transport emissions, and raise productivity, and was inspired by international examples to adopt a ‘compact city’ model that would concentrate growth ‘up’ in existing urban areas while restricting growth ‘out’ at the city fringe.”
  • “Over this period of experimentation and learning (Jacobs & Lees, 2013; McFarlane, 2011; Temenos & McCann, 2012), the idea of relaxing LURs evolved within central government from the initial focus on ‘out’ to encapsulate ‘up’ as well, as it became increasingly clear that both could work as housing affordability interventions. But another important lesson was learned, too: simply encouraging local authorities to implement such interventions did not work. As one former minister explained, a view developed that: 
  • “local government, left to its own devices, would never introduce this kind of reform. Because councils are so exposed to the political pressures of their ratepayers […] we saw that when Auckland Council, in the development of its first Unitary Plan […] faced a basically a NIMBY revolt […] the poor councillors and local board members ran for the hills. And that was, I think, a pretty vivid illustration of how that kind of NIMBY-power is expressed in local government. That makes it very, very hard for these reforms to be made at the local level.””
  • “According to several interviewees, the seminal paper on Auckland’s urban growth boundary by Grimes and Liang (2007, 2009) instigated a community of interest in urban economics and land markets in New Zealand, where one did not exist previously. In the decade preceding the up-zoning policies, this community – including academics, consultants, civil servants, and amateurs – played a significant role in circulating the idea of relaxing LURs. While at first this community was fragmented, many interviewees referred to lecture tours by economist Edward Glaeser and urban planner Alain Bertaud – two internationally renowned proponents of relaxing LURs – in 2013 and 2014 respectively, as key events that connected, inspired, and grew this community.”
  • “The perspectives of [urban economists in Auckland] held an unusual degree of credence in the AUP debates for two reasons. First, Auckland Council, unlike any other local authority, employed a chief economist. Established when the city amalgamated in 2010, the occupants of this role during the AUP development were outspoken advocates for the importance of land markets, and provided internal challenge to the prevailing ‘wisdoms’ of council planners. Second, an economist was included in the government-appointed Independent Hearings Panel advising the council.”
  • “These two policy positions were picked up by ‘Generation Zero’, a youth-led climate action group. Through a series of predominantly social-media based campaigns – advocating for denser urban form to improve livability, reduce car dependency, and lower transport emissions – Generation Zero actively encouraged wider participation (particularly from young people) in the AUP development process, publicly confronting the predominant NIMBY-interests and raising the profile of LURs in the public eye … The early influence of Generation Zero shaped the urban activism movement in two important ways. First, their deliberately non-partisan approach (West & Garlick, 2023) continues to endure in the wider movement … making it easier for politicians on both sides to be open to the idea, and for mainstream media to cover the issue without being perceived as partisan.”
  • “The Labour Party was elected to government in late 2017 off the back of a campaign that centred the ongoing housing crisis as a key issue – their flagship policy, Kiwibuild, promised to build 100,000 homes over the next decade. With this new government came Phil Twyford, who was widely regarded among interviewees as the primary architect of the up-zoning policies that followed – another ‘charismatic individual’ with a central role … Twyford quickly came to believe that “a market-oriented, economic analysis of the problem actually provided the best explanatory framework for the mess that we were in.””
  • “Twyford, once convinced of the urgent need to relax LURs ‘up’ and ‘out’, worked to persuade the Labour caucus to his view: “before I became the housing spokesperson, Labour’s thinking about housing was, essentially, ‘we gotta build more public housing’. And that developers and development are powerful and sometimes dangerous forces that need to be reined-in and controlled. And that the market is something that needs to be tamed rather than harnessed and unleashed.” He found strong support in fellow MP David Parker, the Labour spokesperson for the environment … Upon Labour’s election to government in 2017, Parker was appointed Minister for the Environment, and Twyford was appointed Minister for Housing, Urban Development, and Transport.”
  • “Twyford and Parker both held long-term aspirations for system reform to reduce homeowner-dominance in planning processes, and provide local authorities with better incentives to enable growth – for instance, through reforms to the primary planning legislation and provision of new infrastructure funding and financing tools. But given the escalating urgency of the housing crisis, they wanted to take more immediate action on LURs first, by issuing a more directive National Policy Statement to supersede the existing NPS-UDC. Both had a strong appetite to override local government control over planning; they felt local authorities had been provided enough chances to address the issue independently, and that – as the Productivity Commission had made clear – central government was justified to intervene in what had become a national-scale crisis (for which central government was bearing the costs).”
  • “As work on the new policy statement progressed, Labour’s flagship Kiwibuild homebuilding programme was well behind targets and becoming an embarrassment for the government (Cooke, 2019). Consequently, a Cabinet reshuffle in June 2019 saw Twyford replaced as Minister for Housing (Hickey, 2019), though retaining responsibility for the new policy statement under his urban development portfolio. Two months later, the draft NPS-UD – the first upzoning policy – was released for public consultation (MFE & MHUD, 2019a). According to several interviewees, this consultation ‘flew under the radar’. In fact, none of the ‘outsiders’ interviewed recall being aware it was happening at the time. One civil servant explained that the consultation was combined with two other National Policy Statements – ‘Highly Productive Land’ and ‘Fresh Water’ – both of which proved controversial and overshadowed interest in the “highly technical” and “boring” NPS-UD.”
  • “The final NPS-UD was published in July 2020, in the midst of the global covid-19 pandemic. There was no announcement, and no press release (Cooke, 2021). Many ‘outsiders’ interviewed speculated that this was an intentional move by the government, to avoid attention and controversy. However, one interviewee explained that the Minister for Housing’s communications staff had simply “assumed that it was gonna be so boring that putting out a press release was kind of stupid, or it would just be looked over, or miss-understood”, instead planning for “a big, exclusive story […] that weekend”. Except that they got scooped before they had the chance, by a journalist who had seen someone posting about the new policy on Twitter and promptly sought comment from the opposition: the National Party housing spokesperson immediately denounced the NPS-UD (likely an instinctive reaction to new policy, as an opposition MP), only to be quickly overruled by the infrastructure spokesperson, Chris Bishop, who gave a statement in support (Cooke, 2020).”
  • “At first, without the National Party attacking it, the NPS-UD largely avoided backlash. By David Parker’s recollection, the new up-zoning policy was in fact welcomed by some: “when you talk to mayors and councillors, quite a few of them actually want it […] they don’t like NIMBYism themselves, but they’re hostage to it”. However, several other interviewees speculated the policy only avoided controversy because the public was distracted by the on-going pandemic, and because the policy was quite technical, not very tangible, and it did not take immediate effect – local authorities first had to implement it via scheduled Plan updates over the coming years, before the public would understand its implications.”
  • “Meanwhile Collins [the National Party leader], an unpopular politician, was polling poorly and “looking for an issue to make her own” in the face of an upcoming general election (interview, Bishop). As the housing crisis reached new heights, exacerbated by the pandemic, the advocacy coalition was raising the salience of relaxing LURs as a housing affordability intervention, particularly amongst young voters – a demographic Collins hoped to appeal to … Despite Collins’ efforts, Labour’s strong pandemic response saw them re-elected in October 2020 in a landslide. But over the covid-crisis, house prices had skyrocketed (Leahy, 2020). Towards the end of 2020, ‘housing’ had become the biggest ‘issue facing New Zealanders’ (Dudding, 2020), and Willis (now the National Party housing spokesperson) began pressuring the Labour-government to take stronger action on LURs, urging that the NPS-UD implementation deadline be brought forward. Ministers began to feel that political conditions were favourable to take more radical action on LURs: the mounting housing crisis in combination with the covid-crisis had created a ‘window of opportunity’ (Soaita et al., 2021).”
  • “There was a sense that Aucklanders were becoming more accepting of density and that the AUP was increasingly viewed positively. So, Twyford proposed that the central government simply ‘lift and shift’ the medium density zone from the AUP and require it be applied as the baseline minimum zone across all major urban areas around the country. As David Parker explained: “we were trying to use- as a precedent- something that had been done well.”. Eventually, per civil service advice, ministers settled on a simpler, ‘blunt’ option: enabling up to three homes, of up to three storeys, on any residential land parcel in all major urban areas (the MDRS).”
  • “Ministers wanted to be seen to be responding swiftly to the public mood on housing. So, rather than updating the NPS-UD again, the decision was made to insert the MDRS directly into the primary planning legislation via an amendment act – a pathway made possible by the now Labour-majority in parliament. This pathway would avoid arduous consultation requirements. Instead, the new standards would pass through a parliamentary select committee, a process which could be truncated ‘under urgency’. Alongside, ministers decided to accelerate the NPS-UD, by bringing forward the implementation deadline and requiring local authorities use a ‘streamlined planning process’, which – inspired by the AUP process – would reduce consultation, curtail appeal rights, and appoint Independent Hearings Panels around the country.”
  • “The introduction of the MDRS sparked a resurgence of NIMBY-backlash, leading numerous local authorities to resist its implementation – a situation which some interviewees felt could have been mitigated had local authorities not been ‘blind-sided’. The lack of consultation with local authorities fractured already strained relationships, especially with Auckland Council – where many of the younger staffers who had been most supportive of relaxing LURs under the AUP had since followed the momentum to central government or other local authorities, leaving behind older colleagues who were more receptive to NIMBYism. With Labour’s staunchest advocate for relaxing LURs, Twyford, having been relegated to the backbenches (and replaced by a less enthusiastic minister), National politicians found themselves facing the brunt of the backlash. This backlash was then fueled by politicians from a minor party, ACT, which – despite being ostensibly libertarian  – started cynically campaigning against the MDRS to win voters from National. Consequently, National (now without the leadership of Collins) withdrew support for the MDRS in May 2023 (McConnell, 2023; West & Garlick, 2023) – another scenario that may have been avoidable if minor parties had been included in the bi-partisan negotiations and given the opportunity to buy-in.”
  • “So, what is it then about the New Zealand context that enabled the (somewhat) successful localisation of this globally mobile policy, ‘up-zoning’? The most obvious factor is the unprecedented severity of the housing affordability crisis in New Zealand, which created political conditions conducive to drastic action. However, this crisis is not especially unique to New Zealand, as housing markets in many other countries are now reaching similar heights (Cox, 2023). But New Zealand was in a relatively unique position to take advantage of the ‘window of opportunity’ provided by this crisis (compounded by the covid-crisis). As I have demonstrated with this article, it took more than a decade to prepare fertile ground for New Zealand’s up-zoning policies. Over these years of experimentation, learning, idea circulation, and evolution, the idea of ‘relaxing LURs’ came to dominate the housing affordability policy discourse in New Zealand, with an advocacy coalition in favour of this idea forming between urban economists and activists outside of government (a ‘YIMBY movement’), and a discourse coalition coalescing around ‘competitive urban land markets’ within government.”
  • “As I see it, there were two important factors that enabled this idea to dominate. First, over time, the idea of ‘relaxing LURs’ was legitimised as ‘best practice’ and depoliticised through: the influence of international ‘experts’ (Glaeser and Bertaud) endorsing the idea; the rise and legitimisation of urban economists as ‘experts’ in planning debates; the ‘broad tent’ approach of the urban economics community, as exhibited by the activities of the email group I have profiled; the publications of the Productivity Commission, which leveraged the impartiality of the of the civil service; the somewhat surprising adoption of this market-oriented solution by climate-focused urban activists, and their active efforts to frame the idea as non-partisan; and the unusual willingness of Twyford (and Parker) to consider solutions outside the typical boundaries of left-wing ideology.”
  • “Second, New Zealand is a small and intimate country with a high degree of informality and low power distance. In a society where everyone knows everyone – New Zealanders often claim there are only ‘two degrees of separation’ (Davidson, 2015) – ideas flow easily through ad hoc networks (aided by digital platforms) and movements can develop quickly. The boundaries between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ can be blurry, as individuals are often broadly connected to- and move readily between- different layers of government, private consultancies, advocacy/activism circuits, and politics.”
  • “[I]n my observation interviewees across both groups often appeared anxious to communicate that they did not view relaxing LURs as a ‘silver bullet’ solution, and understood the housing crisis to be a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel & Webber, 1973). In fact, many seemed to (sub)consciously object to my focus on up-zoning and LURs as an interviewer, often actively broadening the scope of discussion to discuss other drivers – for instance, infrastructure deficits – and possible interventions (both supply-side and demand-side). Up-zoning is understood to be merely part of a suite of solutions.”
  • “Another critical element was the small-scale test-cases conducted in New Zealand in the years preceding the up-zoning policies. Within policy mobilities research, ‘scanning globally’ for policy ‘ideas from elsewhere’ has been understood to be play an important role in the process of local persuasion (Cochrane & Ward, 2012; McCann & Ward, 2012), as international ‘best practice’ tends to be prized in environments where ‘evidence-based policy is idealised’ (Temenos et al., 2019, p.109). In this case, local experimentation provided critical components for the construction of New Zealand’s up-zoning policies (in addition to the globally-sourced components). Indeed, most of the policy actors I interviewed turned to discussing international influences only in response to my probing; the local test-cases – the Christchurch rebuild, the AUP, the Special Housing Areas, and the NPS-UDC – were highly salient. Clearly, the New Zealand-specific evidence derived from these test-cases was critical to making sceptics more comfortable with applying the idea of ‘relaxing LURs’ at the national scale via the recent up-zoning policies. Further, the lessons learned from these experiments were key to overcoming political reluctance to override local authorities.”
  • “Finally, while one could argue that these two upzoning policies were perhaps a matter of time – the policy space had been moving in this direction for a while already – they were also very much a matter of timing. Twyford and Parker could not have anticipated the onset of the covid-crisis, which shielded their flagship upzoning policy (the NPS-UD) from public scrutiny, easing the way for the more ambitious, broad MDRS that followed. Nor could they have reasonably expected National Party politicians to courageously rise above the incentives for oppositional politicking, to support the NPS-UD and collaborate in good faith on the MDRS; it was fortunate that Bishop found himself in a position of power at a critical decision making junction, and that Collins’ brief tenure as National Party leader aligned with the short period during which these policies were introduced (her replacement is not enthusiastic about relaxing LURs).”

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA housing voice podcast, and I'm your host. Shane Phillips, this week's episode is a very exciting one, and simultaneously right in our wheelhouse and a bit of a departure. It's a conversation with Eleanor west on the broad zoning reforms enacted in Auckland and throughout New Zealand, which is the topic we've discussed before, but this time, we're focusing on the political conditions that made such big changes possible. This was the topic of Eleanor's master's thesis, which she published earlier this year, and it offers a tremendous number of lessons that apply far beyond New Zealand's relatively small and distant borders. Much of what you'll hear in this episode has come up in previous episodes in one form or another, but I think there's a lot of value in putting it all together in a single case study and in this one interview. This is an episode I'm sure I will be returning to in the future, not only to remind myself of what I learned, but also to remind myself of what's possible through dedicated and organized effort. I hope you feel the same after listening. So enjoy the housing voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante and Irene Marie Cruz, as always, we appreciate when listeners can give our show a positive review or rating on Apple or Spotify, and you can reach me at Shane phillips@ucla.edu with comments, questions, show ideas or nice notes on how you've used the podcast to improve your understanding, teach or otherwise do good with that. Let's get to our conversation with Eleanor West.

Eleanor West is a research associate at the University of Auckland Economic Policy Center and former policy advisor in the New Zealand civil service, and in her words, an on and off again urban activist, and she's joining us to talk about how the intellectual and political foundations were built for the groundbreaking, probably unprecedented zoning reforms adopted in New Zealand over the past decade. Eleanor, thanks for joining us, and welcome to the housing voice podcast.

Eleanor West 2:23
Great to be here.

Shane Phillips 2:24
And my co host today is Mike Manville. Hey Mike,

Michael Manville 2:27
hey everybody. Great to be here.

Shane Phillips 2:29
Eleanor, I know you are a listener to the show, so you know, our first question before we get into the research, we want a tour. Where are you taking us? I know you've been traveling quite a bit in the time I've known you, but I think we're going to stick to New Zealand, right?

Eleanor West 2:42
Yeah, for sure. So I would be taking you on a tour to the bustling metropolis of Wellington, New Zealand. I'm a born and raised wellingtonian, and Wellington is objectively the best city in New Zealand and possibly the entire world. It's very walkable to see what's going on. It's close to beautiful mountains, beaches, the bush and the weather is very exciting. You can't beat Wellington on a good day. So I would probably start the day with a bit of a coffee crawl. The Wellington Cafe scene is off the hook. I think it's because the housing crisis is so bad that no one has their own living room, maybe. But then something that I think is really cool about Wellington is that you can get to the marine reserve on the south coast by bus, so we would go snorkeling on this tour. And I warn you that the border is always freezing, even in the height of summer, and if the weather is not so good, it'll be super cloudy and you won't be able to see anything. But that has never stopped me from forcing anyone to go snorkeling with me.

Michael Manville 3:36
You're not selling it. I gotta.

Eleanor West 3:39
Wellington also has a really great music scene. So I probably want to wrap the day up with a gig. You know, the venues are small, so lots of people, it'll be warm after you've been in the freezing cold south coast, you know, warm up with a bit of a boogie. So yeah, thanks for that opening question. It's a great chance for me to establish my stuff is very cool before you reveal me to be a huge nerd.

Shane Phillips 3:59
I am a little surprised that the water is cold. I feel like Australia is known for pretty warm water, right? We had this conversation with Ryan when he was on 20 episodes or so ago. But New Zealand is much further away from Australia than I initially realized, until I looked at the map for the first time in a long time. But is everywhere around the country just cold water?

Eleanor West 4:21
Well, you're asking the right person. I studied environmental science. We spent a lot of time talking about ocean currents around New Zealand. But Auckland, where Ryan's from, is in the north of the country, and New Zealand's very like long in the north to south axis. So like the north part where Ryan lives, you get the currents coming off the coast of Australia. So the water up there is quite warm, but Wellington, you get the second polar current that comes around Antarctica, so it's cold all the time.

Shane Phillips 4:46
That is a big difference. All right, so for today's conversation, we're going to center on Eleanor's research paper titled up zoning New Zealand, the localization of a globally mobile policy idea. But we're also going to refer listener. To a somewhat shorter and more accessible essay she wrote with Marco Garlick for the online magazine. Works in progress. We've got links to both in our show notes. In episode 45 as I said, we talked to Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy about the 2016 Auckland Unitary Plan, which significantly up zoned about three quarters of the city. It was an upzoning of a breadth and scale that we had not seen in the English speaking world, probably for decades. In that conversation, we also mentioned the reforms passed by the central government later, especially the medium density residential standards with Ryan, we were really focused on what Auckland did and the effect of its actions on housing production and affordability. What we didn't really discuss is how Auckland managed to pass those reforms when most other cities are still fighting over whether to take much less ambitious actions like allowing accessory dwelling units or duplexes or allowing denser, multi family housing along select commercial corridors, for example, in some ways the how is the much harder question, but Eleanor really dug in and drew out some valuable lessons that I think can be applied beyond New Zealand's borders. Her paper is structured around the concept of policy mobilities, or how policies conceived of or implemented in one part of the world are adapted and adopted elsewhere, and we are hoping the transfer of this upzoning policy into New Zealand helps inform its implementation here in North America, where a lot of the modern theorizing and advocacy on upzoning got its start. Our plan here is to discuss a range of possible explanations, most or all of which are complementary and not mutually exclusive. They include timing, and separately, the passage of time, political amalgamation, state preemption and emphasis on various goals from reform, not just affordability, intentionally, nonpartisan advocacy, the influence of academic research, and researchers, we love to hear it, and good old fashioned local government intransigence leading to frustration by those in higher levels of government. I don't think that all of these things need to be present to do what New Zealand did, but it is definitely hard to imagine what they did happening without at least some of these conditions being met. So before we talk about your research, Eleanor, let's start here. How bad is housing affordability in New Zealand, or how bad was it in the latter half of the 2010s? Things are really tough here in the US, especially along the coasts, but things in New Zealand have been even worse for quite a while, right?

Eleanor West 7:38
Yeah, so New Zealand has some of the most expensive housing in the world. So prices have skyrocketed in the last couple of decades. They rose 256% between 2000 and 2021 and that's adjusted for inflation, compared to 110% in Britain and a mere 64% in America. So zooming into the city scale in 2022 like the house price to income ratio in New York had reached 7.1 and it was 8.7 in Greater London, but in Auckland, which is our largest city, home to about a third of New Zealanders, it was 10.8. So, yeah, housing has been wildly unaffordable in New Zealand for a long time. But I think it's also really important to note that the housing quality in New Zealand is also crap. You get people paying over a million for a drafty, uninsulated wooden bungalow with single glazed windows. And New Zealand is very humid, and the houses get damp and moldy like you would not believe. A lot of people think that rheumatic fever is a third world disease, but we still get cases of that in New Zealand.

Shane Phillips 8:37
Yeah, the million dollar drafty, uninsulated wooden bungalow sounds familiar here in California, but maybe important to note that New Zealand, you can't really escape it like you can in the US, there are more affordable places than California, and it sucks that people can't afford to live here and often have to move elsewhere. But in New Zealand, I mean, there probably just aren't many other places to go, right? Like, where do you go to find more affordable housing?

Eleanor West 9:03
You move to Australia. That's where everyone's moving. The brain drain is rude, which isn't particularly affordable either, no, but the pay is better, right here.

Shane Phillips 9:14
And what is your connection to all of this? Tell us a little bit about your background and what drew you to this research topic, and maybe also why you were in a pretty good position to take this specific research on.

Eleanor West 9:26
Yeah, sure. So I've always been pretty passionate about the environment and climate change. Like I said earlier, I studied environmental science for my undergraduate degree, but I really liked architecture and design as well. So when I graduated, I went and worked for the New Zealand Green Building Council for a few years, and around that time, I started volunteering for generation zero, which is a youth led climate action organization in New Zealand. So generation zero is the organization that was responsible for pressuring the New Zealand government into passing the Zero Carbon Act in 2019 but they were also really active in Auckland during the Auckland Unitary Plan debates. So they were campaigning up there for denser urban. Form. I joined in Wellington around the time that the Zero Carbon Act got passed, which is where I met Marco, actually, who co authored that works in progress article with me. So we were fishing around for a new advocacy project after the Zero Carbon Act passed, and Wellington City was about to start drafting its new district plan. And Marco had been living in Auckland during the whole Auckland Unitary Plan debate, and he was pretty inspired by how much influence generation zero had generated campaigning on urban planning issues up there. And he was like, We should do that here. And I was like, okay, not really knowing what I was getting into. So yeah, that's how I ended up getting a bit obsessed with zoning reform, or up zoning more specifically, I guess so, Marco and I ended up coordinating a very successful pressure campaign where we eventually managed to persuade the city council to up zone most of Wellington, just like Auckland. So Wellington adopted their new plan just a few months ago. But actually, I took a break from that campaign for like, a year between 2021 and 2022 when I went and worked as a policy advisor for the Ministry for housing and urban development. So this was during the time that the medium density residential standards were going through Parliament, and I wasn't working on the wasn't working on those, but my colleagues were so then in early 2022 I was kind of looking for a change of scene, so I ended up moving to the Netherlands to start a research master's program, and I decided to do my thesis project on the genesis of those nationwide upzoning reforms that passed in New Zealand. Because I think I figured that if I was going to spend a year of my life on something, I wanted it to be useful, and I knew that there was a lot of interest internationally in understanding how these reforms happened, and I was in a pretty unique position to be able to do that research. I had connections to all the politicians and policy advisors and academics and housing activists involved in that so I was pretty sure I could convince the former and current minister for housing to participate in interviews. So that article that I believe Marco into writing with me, that was kind of exploratory. We actually wrote it before I started doing any interviews. And then this research paper I published more recently, that was the output of my thesis here.

Shane Phillips 11:51
Yeah, and I guess I should say that we know each other, because you reached out to me as a part of the thesis project, kind of early on one of, I'm sure, many unofficial advisors, just kind of reading through things, bouncing ideas off of me, and me bouncing ideas off of you, to some extent as well. So that's how I even became aware of this in the first place, and I've been following it with a lot of interest over the past couple years.

Eleanor West 12:14
Yeah, I'm all about cold emailing people.

Shane Phillips 12:17
It works, especially with academics. We're busy, but somehow we like to talk about our work, and we will actually come back to Wellington's zoning reforms in a little bit just to talk about them, but that will be maybe later in this conversation. Our focus in this conversation, though, is not going to be on what Auckland and the New Zealand central government actually did or its effects. As I said, we covered quite a bit of that with Ryan in Episode 45 and in the show notes, we'll put some of the work he's published since that interview. Instead, we're going to talk about how these big policy changes were achieved, mainly through the lens of politics. That said it's important to know a bit about the policies to appreciate just what an achievement it was passing them into law. So take a few minutes to walk us through the sequence of major reforms and what they did. I think we may be able to stick to the Auckland Unitary Plan in 2016 the national policy statement on urban development in 2020 and the medium density residential standards, which you mentioned in 2021 your paper is mainly about the latter two, but as a predecessor and precedent, the Auckland policy is probably important enough to group together with them.

Eleanor West 13:28
Yeah, well, actually, I think you really need to start with the Christchurch earthquake in 2011 so Christchurch is a, technically the second biggest city in New Zealand, and with so many houses suddenly turned to rubble. There was a huge shortage and prices down there spiked massively, really quickly.

Shane Phillips 13:45
Why "technically" the second largest city?

Eleanor West 13:48
Well, I think it depends where you draw the boundaries. Wellington, if you look at the region, you could make a case that it's the second biggest city in New Zealand.

Shane Phillips 13:58
Okay, you just want to

Eleanor West 13:59
This is a territorial dispute. Yeah, so we had a Conservative government at the time, and they were pretty receptive to advice from a bunch of economists and the Productivity Commission to suspend parts of the primary planning legislation in Christchurch and urgently rezone a load of the rural land surrounding the city for new housing. So they wanted to kick start a market led rebuild down there that works spectacularly well. Like post quake, Christchurch ended up being pretty sprawley, but without so much red tape, heaps of new houses were built really quickly, and consequently, house prices in Christchurch have been flat lining for years when they've been skyrocketing in other major cities. So that was 2011 and around that time, the central government also decided to amalgamate a bunch of local authorities in the Auckland region into the Auckland Super City. So the new council there was directed to draft a new unitary plan for the city, which they decided to do from scratch instead of just merging existing plans. So the new councilors and the mayor, they were really ambitious. They had lots of fresh start vibes and. They got hooked on this idea of a compact city. So at the time, congestion in Auckland was quite bad, to put it mildly, so they wanted to focus on building up and invest more in public transport and all of that. So they released a draft proposing huge up zonings across the whole city, including in the wealthy, low density character suburbs that are full of pre 1930s wooden bungalows close to the city center. As you can imagine, the NIMBY outrage was fierce, and quite a few councilors backed down, but by then, the central government had started to get really concerned about house prices in Auckland, and the Productivity Commission kept telling them that it was a supply issue being caused by zoning constraints. And so the central government essentially put the squeeze on Auckland Council, and they threatened them quite publicly. And so the final Unitary Plan that got passed in 2016 was pretty ambitious. It Up zoned about three quarters of Auckland. And I mean, it wasn't perfect. Some wealthy parts of the city managed to hide behind their special character status and avoid getting up zoned. But all in all, it was a really good thing for the city, and as Ryan said when you interviewed him, it had a significant effect on house prices.

Shane Phillips 16:04
And just to connect these a little bit, the Christchurch experience basically taught the central government that if you do zoning reforms, if you do things to enable market led development, it will actually develop.

Eleanor West 16:18
Yeah. The Christchurch experience, among other things, yeah, than the advice they were getting from economists and whatnot. Got it then in 2017 so after the Auckland unitary plan passed, the more liberal Labor Party came into government, and by then, house prices around the country were surging. Auckland had just kind of been ahead of that trend. So a few of the new ministers, they wanted to do something really drastic, and they knew zoning rules were the problem, and they were sick of waiting for local authorities to sort it out themselves. This is too much NIMBY pressure on councils, I guess so they decided to pass two national scale zoning policies that force councils to up zone which kind of miraculously the conservative opposition party decided to support. So the 2020, National Policy Statement on urban development directed councils to raise building height limits in city centers, suburban centers and around rapid transit stops, and then the medium density residential standards, a year later, required councilors to set a new default base zone of three homes of up to three storeys on any section by right.

Shane Phillips 17:15
Can you say a little bit more about the medium density residential standards and their effect? I have a chart that I actually put together from, actually I put this together almost a year ago, but Auckland's housing production shot up really dramatically overall. I don't know. I think Ryan's estimate is it was about three times as much as it would have been, if not for those zoning reforms. But really importantly, almost all of the increase was in what are known as townhouses, flats, units and other dwellings. And for a North American audience, we can mostly just think of this as townhouses, row houses, that kind of thing. You know, maybe just three at a time, in many cases, and not larger scale, multi family, five story, seven story, 20 story buildings. So is there anything else to say about that? Because I think the fact that that's where a lot of this development took place, and not in these other building types, is pretty important. Yeah,

Eleanor West 18:14
I think that there are. I mean, it's been a while since I've looked into the research on this. I think there's probably a lot of different reasons why that happened. I think part of the reason is that where they did raise building height limits enough to enable apartment buildings, they often didn't raise them enough to enable the kind of apartment buildings that are profitable for developers to build. So when you go up a certain height, you need to install an elevator, and if you can't go high enough to justify the cost of an elevator, then you don't do it. So it's easier to build terraces and three story walk up apartment buildings in those instances. I think it's also possibly what the market was ready for a bit in Auckland. You know, New Zealand is used to living in sprawling cities where everyone has their own backyard. You know, terraces are maybe, in some cases, a bit of an easier sell. And then I think you also get the case, and I don't know how much of a problem it is in Auckland compared to the rest of the rest of the country, but New Zealand's construction market is really small, and we don't have a lot of large scale developers who can take on the kind of big, multi family projects that you're talking about. So I think what we saw in Auckland is that the supply response was really rapid, like it happened really quickly, and I think that is because these terrace, like, walk up departments, they're achievable for small developers to, like, roll out quickly.

Shane Phillips 19:23
Yeah, that's a really good point, and I think that is a lesson for us here in the US as well. You know, looking to places like Houston that allow this kind of development, it's something that in part, because I'm sure the code situation is a little different in New Zealand, but here in the US, single family homes and townhouses are built to the same code, the International residential code, as it's known, even though it's really just the US residential code, okay? And anything that is three units or above, excluding townhouses which could be attached, but are still considered single family, they are built to the International Building Code, which is more expensive, maybe 20% More expensive per square foot. Plus there's issues with, you know, having to have condos if you want to own them, rather than being able to own the building kind of free and clear. So I think we would find something similar here. And there's just, you know, many communities, most of the builders are building single family homes. And so the idea that you could just suddenly allow large, multi family buildings, but not have anyone experience building them as a real, real barrier. And so townhouses are maybe a bridge at the very least. Yeah,

Eleanor West 20:27
I think that one other thing is that often, like apartment buildings, they have to be quite bespoke to the site, whereas the terraces, you can kind of duplicate the same design over and over again. And one of the advantages when they amalgamated Auckland and amalgamated all the plans is that developers could then come up with townhouses that worked everywhere in Auckland, you didn't have to comply with North Shore city differently to Auckland Central, or all the different cities before they'd amalgamated.

Michael Manville 20:52
Yeah, and I don't know if it's an issue in New Zealand, but certainly in the United States, once you get a construction project of a certain size, you don't just need the knowledgeable developers, but you often need a union labor team. And if there's insufficient union labor available, or insufficient labor that has a particular union training, like skilled and trained labor, that becomes a slow down factor as well. And that's not the case with smaller the unions are not usually that concerned if someone throws up a triplex without union labor, but if 15 story apartment buildings going up, they certainly want their guys on that crew,

Shane Phillips 21:27
right? All right. So with that established, the first couple explanations or conditions that I want to cover are, one, laying the intellectual groundwork for these reforms, and two time for those of us on this side of the Pacific, certainly for me, Auckland was not really on the radar until 2019, 2020, 2021, I don't remember exactly, but pretty recently from afar, that sort of made it seem like these Auckland and New Zealand policies came out of nowhere. But you make the argument that the ground was ceded intellectually way back in the late 2000s by a few big name scholars here in the US, actually, could you share some of that background?

Eleanor West 22:09
Yeah, sure. So when I set out to do this research, I kind of framed it within this academic concept of policy mobilities, which kind of looks at how policy ideas circulate globally and get picked up in different places. So I think I'd assumed that New Zealand had stolen this up zoning idea from somewhere else. You've been talking about this stuff for a long time in the US, but as I discovered, as it happens, New Zealand has been talking about relaxing land use regulations for ages too, but we started with more of a focus on relaxing constraints, on growing out rather than up. So lots of the people I talked to told me that it all started with this working paper that was published by a New Zealand economist, Arthur Grimes around 2008 so I actually interviewed Arthur as part of my research, and he told me that at the time, he'd been looking into why house prices were climbing so rapidly, and he'd started hearing from the New Zealand developer community that they were having huge frustrations with the restrictiveness of planning rules, particularly the municipal urban limit that was being imposed in Auckland, beyond which the council was refusing to zone for residential so that was effectively an outward growth limit on the city.

Shane Phillips 23:10
This is like an urban growth boundary, is what we might call it here, or even like a green belt.

Eleanor West 23:15
An urban growth boundary, essentially, yeah, got it so Arthur found this huge jump in land prices across that boundary. The boundary was essentially acting as a binding constraint. And actually went back through my notes, and I dug out a quote for you so Arthur told me at that stage it was a real surprise to the people in Auckland Council. They hadn't really thought about this. I gave a talk shortly after that paper was published in Auckland, which was attended by a lot of council people. I said house prices just inside the boundary at 10 times the level of house prices just outside. And someone from Auckland Council said, What does it matter if house prices are 10% higher inside the boundary than outside? And I said, No, not 10% higher, 10 times higher, 1,000% higher. And they said, What does it matter if prices are 1,000% higher inside and it was like the council people just couldn't care less about the economic implications or the social implications of that end quote, yeah, so councilors didn't care, but central government economists took notice, particularly at the Productivity Commission. So Arthur's paper had a huge influence on their later investigations into the drivers of the housing crisis. Auckland Council's chief economist was also pretty flawed. So I interviewed him too, and he told me about how this paper sparked an interest in urban economics in New Zealand in a way that there never really had been before. So he was kind of like, Oh, I better go look at the economic impacts of all the other land use regulations they want to put into the new Unitary Plan. And he described that as being like opening Pandora's Box. No one had ever really thought about this stuff before. So that kind of sparked the initial interest in land use regulations. But then it was Ed Glaser visiting for a series of lectures in 2013 and then Elaine Bertoud In 2014 that really focused this attention. People are still talking about how impactful those two lecture tours were. Like several of the politicians that I interviewed told me. They were persuaded by these academics politicians that later went on to push through those central up zoning policies.

Michael Manville 25:05
I mean, I'm already seeing wild differences between New Zealand and the United States. I mean, you have a Productivity Commission at the national level, or you did. I mean, well, we that's not something the US has. You have cities that have chief economists, which is not something that's a thing in the United States.

Shane Phillips 25:26
Actually, I think, ironically, I think San Francisco, of all places, has a chief economist.

Michael Manville 25:31
Is that right? Okay? It's very uncommon in the US, for sure.

Eleanor West 25:36
I mean, it's uncommon in New Zealand as well. So Auckland Council, as far as I'm aware, is the only council that has a chief economist, and that position was only created when Auckland was amalgamated. So Jeff, when I interviewed him, he was telling me like he was their first ever Chief Economist, and this was all new to him. You know, they were kind of like, here's a unitary plan. And he just kind of had to take it from there.

Michael Manville 25:55
I mean, it's striking, though, because it's, you know, you don't want to ascribe too much influence to any one factor. But what's very common in the United States is that a local government will have something the name varies a little bit like a chief legislative analyst who may try to figure out the impacts of a given law. But oftentimes, this person is an attorney, and does it, you know, there's a little bit of cost benefit analysis that goes into, you know, a proposed law, but most often, and I don't want to generalize too much, but I think it's fair to say that most often, it's sort of, there's a fiscal thing, like, how much will this cost the city and actually direct taxes and revenues, and then, sort of, like, a hey, will we get sued? And so what the federal government the United States is, you know, the economists are falling out of trees there in the various different agencies, but once you get down to the state and the local level, that kind of analysis, and frankly, the receptiveness to that particular kind of analysis is much less common. So it's very interesting that you had this situation that I guess was fairly unusual, where both the national government and the Auckland City government had that kind of expertise at the same time,

Shane Phillips 27:00
I do feel like there's a on the one hand, there's the point that they were just very different conditions, and it's hard to duplicate those. My optimistic perspective on this point is that reform just takes a long time. And I think if you were looking at New Zealand and thinking that they just got started in 2014 or 2016 and look at all they've accomplished. You might be a little bit depressed about how little we've accomplished here in the US, but in fact, they've been, you know, working on this stuff for for going on 15 or more years. And I think that's not even quite true here in much of the US, we have not done almost anywhere as much as Auckland has done. And certainly at the federal government, national government level, haven't done anything like what New Zealand did. I think our government is just not structured to do exactly what New Zealand did. But we have accomplished a lot, and we continue accomplishing a lot. And when I look back five years ago to a time when we still had single family zoning in California. We still had parking requirements pretty much everywhere, and those are now largely abolished, at least in the most important areas. I don't know it's it gives me some hope that this is partly just something that takes time, and we're on our way. Seems that way from afar. So that is the scholarship and time it takes a while for ideas to move from academia or niche interest groups and become more mainstream, and New Zealand got a pretty early start on that. You also talk about how the original motivation for Auckland's up zoning had less to do with affordability than with benefits of density or smart growth, stuff like livability, mobility, environmental sustainability, fiscal resilience, economic productivity. I don't think you make this argument in your paper, at least not explicitly. But do you think that approach had some strengths politically, if nothing else, it seems that things like better transit, more neighborhood amenities, cleaner air and so on are pretty universally appreciated, whereas improved affordability does have lots of winners and losers, like a homeowner may abstractly be in favor of increased affordability, but their attitude might change a bit if they feel like that'll translate into a lower home value for them. What do you think?

Eleanor West 29:14
I think that those more tangible benefits resonate with people across the spectrum, for sure, probably more than the housing affordability arguments do. So I'm actually pretty interested in the recent research that's coming out of the states looking at this idea of supply skepticism. So a pretty significant portion of the population don't seem able to apply the normal logics of supply and demand to the housing market, like they don't believe a significant increase in new homes will result in lower prices, which is super weird, and I wouldn't be surprised if that finding holds in New Zealand too. So I think a lot of people don't understand up zoning to be a housing affordability policy anyway, that supply and demand logic for that to make sense to them is just not there. I also don't really think that opposition to new housing is motivated by financial concerns either. Like people have very real and valid concerns about loss of amenity, loss of green space, fewer places for their kids in schools and busier doctors offices. I think its interesting because Auckland Council definitely didn't try to sell housing affordability as a primary goal for the Auckland unitary plan, but the central government did try to sell their later upzoning policies as housing affordability policies, and there has been a lot of backlash to them, like the Conservatives eventually caved under that backlash and withdrew their support for the second policy, the medium density residential standards. So maybe if there had been more focus on those co benefits that you just listed, the reception might have been different.

Shane Phillips 30:34
I guess it's interesting, in part, because the medium density residential standards were probably responsible for the most housing production, but from a smart growth perspective, they might be kind of the weakest approach, because they're just spreading out housing kind of, it can go anywhere. It's not really tied to transit proximity. It's higher density, but not dramatically higher. You know, it's basically three homes where one might have been before. And that's not to denigrate it at all. I think it was an important and very effective policy, but it is harder to make that case, that this is improving transit service, environmental sustainability, it's doing those things. I suppose. It's just not as effective, probably, as higher density projects might be

Michael Manville 31:21
The environmental sustainability argument is always a hard one to make to the people in the area being up zoned, particularly if the upzoning is dramatic, right? Because the upzoning jurisdiction is basically doing a favor for the world. You know that you're concentrating a lot of activity in this place, and as a result of it, what would have been vehicle trips outside the city now become walking trips within the city, and that's a huge benefit for the world as a whole, or the region as a whole. But if even a small fraction of those people drive air pollution in that place gets worse. Air pollution is worse in New York City than it is in Syracuse. Even though New York City is a far more sustainable, high density, sustainable transportation place, its just that even if only 10% of the people drive you have so many people, the air is just worse in New York City. So you really right. It's a tough thing to say to someone in a city, hey, if you absorb some slightly worse air pollution, we're all going to be a lot better off, even though that is it's a legitimate benefit. But the other benefits, of course, there's a reason people pay so much to live in New York City, is that that density delivers many other conveniences and things people enjoy. But I do think that the air quality argument is a one that has to be deployed carefully, because otherwise, people will just think you're gaslighting them that like there's reason, if you live in New York, you like to get to the countryside now and then, yeah.

Eleanor West 32:47
Yeah, I think it's a classic case of widespread benefits and concentrated costs, right?

Shane Phillips 32:51
Yeah. And just the difference between absolute levels of something and per capita levels too,

Michael Manville 32:57
right? And then that's, you know, one of the great problems that we've always had with all these housing reforms is just that what's good for the world can sometimes be bad for the neighborhood, and if the neighborhood's in charge of writing the rules, I mean, you're not going to get that sort of world improving change.

Shane Phillips 33:12
All right. So next on my list is the amalgamation of Auckland's government so that a wider area was under the jurisdiction of a single city council that political amalgamation was mandated by the central government and occurred in 2010 it seems that larger jurisdictions are often better able to push these reforms through, maybe in part, because they're too big to free ride on the efforts of neighboring jurisdictions. I think we see this in LA to some extent, which, while far from perfect, does account for about 40% of Los Angeles County's population, but about two thirds of its housing production since the late 2000s so it is leading relative to the other 87 cities, Toronto and Halifax have amalgamated governments similar to Auckland's also mandated by higher level governments, and have done some pretty good things on housing lately, especially Halifax, actually, as a pretty small city, Nashville is a rare case of an amalgamated government in the US, and it builds more housing per capita than just about any other jurisdiction in the country. What have you observed about the effects of this kind of consolidation, and are there any drawbacks to be aware of.

Eleanor West 34:21
Yeah, I definitely think that Auckland being amalgamated did help push through the up zoning there, but I think that you can make that argument in both directions. To be honest, like Auckland Council would have watered down the unitary plan after their draft received so much dimby backlash if the central government hadn't stepped in, and they actually tried to, but they weren't able to in the end, because the central government had set up this fast track planning process for the Auckland Unitary Plan, which involved the appointment of an independent hearings panel that was making recommendations to the council. And this panel had an economist on it who pushed for wide scale up zoning. And also the central government kept publicly threatening the council, and they're not empty threats either. In. In New Zealand, like they could have replaced the councilors with commissioners at any time, really. Oh, so I think that the new plan would have been a step forward from the old plan, but it wouldn't have been as ambitious as it was if central government hadn't intervened. And then, for another example, in the opposite direction. So in the Wellington region, where I'm from, we haven't been amalgamated yet. I hope we will be one day, and then we will maybe be New Zealand's second biggest city. Maybe.

Shane Phillips 35:29
Officially.

Michael Manville 35:30
You could make a case. You could make a case you are already,

Eleanor West 35:33
Yeah, right. You could.

Michael Manville 35:34
I've heard that.

Eleanor West 35:35
You've heard that somewhere, yeah. But historically, Wellington City Council has imposed very restrictive zoning with very little new housing being built, which is crazy. I mean, it's the capital, but they don't let you build new homes. So in the mid 2010s we saw one of Wellington satellite cities massively relax their zoning rules. Like, if Wellington is going to say no to growth and all of the productivity gains that come with that, then Hutt city would say yes. So maybe there is some advantage to letting smaller jurisdictions compete with each other, but ultimately, I really do think it's a matter of scale. So even as a Super City, Auckland was too small for the widespread benefits of upzoning to Trump those local costs and those local concerns and also all of the elected councilors they have, like constituents that they represent, whereas at the central government level, in New Zealand, a pretty big chunk of our members of parliament are elected at large, which is something that I probably should have gotten into in my paper, so they're not representing local electorates, and they can maybe afford to prioritize the national benefits over local costs a little more. I think it makes a lot of sense for the central government to play a larger, more directive role in land use planning. I mean, many of the costs of the housing crisis are being born nationally, so I don't really understand why local authorities should get all the control.

Shane Phillips 36:50
Yeah, the point about at large elected officials does seem important, and that applies even at the local level. We had a conversation with Michael Hankinson about this on the podcast quite a while back, where he found that cities in California that shifted from at large elections, which is basically where each council member is elected by the entire electorate of the city, versus district elections, where everyone just has a part of the city and only the people in that part in that district vote for their council member. The places that shifted to district elections as a result of a state law have seen their housing permitting decline over time, and specifically in the most poorly represented districts before, where you might have more low income people, more Latino households that were poorly represented on the council. And that was the point of the state reform, was to improve representation, and it succeeded at that, but the unintended consequence was also to reduce housing permitting. And what I said in that conversation was clearly the answer is not to go back to a very unrepresentative political system, but one thing that the state government can do is now step in and do things to kind of account for offset the the negative unintended consequences of it. I do kind of wonder, though it does seem like one consequence of amalgamation could be now you've got all of these suburban districts as part of the city, and they might be very NIMBY, and they could kind of overpower the votes of the more urban council members. Do you have a sense for why that wasn't the case, or maybe that was the case, and it was only the pressure of the central government that led them to do all that they did.

Eleanor West 38:28
Yeah, the urban form in New Zealand is kind of weird with our cities because they were built so recently. I mean, New Zealand was quite recently colonized. Our really low density of parts of the city are actually quite close to the city center. They're the like donut around the city center in Auckland and Wellington, where we have all these pre 1930s wooden villas, those tend to be the wealthier areas. So they were already part of Auckland City before all the satellite cities were amalgamated into Auckland. So I think actually, like, its possible that those suburbs lost a bit of power in that amalgamation. I think they also gained power in some ways, because they were able to force the new density onto the politically weak parts of the city that previously hadn't been part of their city, you know, like those had been other cities, but now they were part of Auckland City, and these powerful, wealthy suburbs perhaps had more influence on council. Because I think something else that's probably important to note, which I always think is obvious, because I'm deep in the weeds on this stuff, but people don't vote in local elections. In New Zealand, I think we achieve like 40% turnout, and its pretty homeowner dominated, which is another reason why I think central government is more able to take national concerns into account. Because there's like, an 80% voter turnout in general elections, which, like on average, which, if you assume that the local elections are mostly homeowners voting, than those that extra 40% that's voting in general elections, some of those are going to be renters, you know, people, people who don't own homes, or people who want to buy homes and are concerned about house prices.

Shane Phillips 39:54
40% turnout for municipal elections in many US cities would be an out. Standing improvement. I mean, yeah, prior to Los Angeles changing the dates of its city elections to align with federal elections, Congress and presidential elections, we would often get 10 to 15% turnout for city council and mayoral votes. And now, yeah, I think we're, we tend to be at least in the general election, not so much the primary, maybe closer to do you know, Mike, I mean, I'm sure in the non presidential years, it's probably between 50 and 70, and then in presidential it's probably upward of 70% 80% somewhere around there.

Michael Manville 40:31
Those might be a bit high. But we do, all right, yeah, we do. We do pretty I think my recollection, I could be wrong about this, is that when we coincide with the presidential we're over 60. But you know, it's just, this is also just kind of like, Americans vote so much, we have so many elections, so many elected offices, that, like in any given election, our turnout isn't very high. And then it's true. As you move down the chain, it's a state election, it's a local election, your participation falls off. It's, uh, you know, it's just, it's another layer to this whole discussion, right? Which is just that, you know, a lot of these decisions are being made using a representative channel, but not necessarily representative way, just because participation is so low. And that's not really anyone's fault, but it is a fact, whenever we interpret elections to remember that, like, well, a lot of people just didn't seem to care. And so and you know, you can sort of interpret that in different ways, but it is a big omitted variable. Yeah.

Shane Phillips 41:29
I mean, we talk all the time about how a few angry homeowners showing up to a public meeting to oppose a project or a plan or what have you, is a real problem and unrepresentative, but we don't talk nearly as much about the fact that even the council members voting on these things may have only gotten the vote of 8% of the electorate within their district. Even now it might only be 20 or 30%

Michael Manville 41:52
Yeah, that's right, not carrying a giant mandate in the traditional sense of the word.

Eleanor West 41:58
There's a really funny video floating around on YouTube that Hayden Danelle made during the Auckland Unitary Plan debates about the worst council meeting of all time, where he went to one of the Auckland Unitary Plan council meetings to see, you know, the wave of older folks. And there were a couple young people presented, and they got like his stat, it was just horrific.

Shane Phillips 42:20
Yeah, very common, unfortunately, been on the receiving end of some of the hissing from people 30 or 40 years my senior. It's really kind of disturbing and depressing. It's really weird.

Michael Manville 42:32
Another you know, you mentioned this, and I just want to come back to it that a threat from the central government is not necessarily an empty threat, and they could essentially swap out these elected officials with commissioners. I mean, that's a substantial difference, both in terms of power and, I think, willpower, from the United States. You know, in the US, the law has been interpreted. The constitution has been interpreted to say that local governments are, they're what's called creatures of the state. You know, they never mentioned in the US Constitution. They're products of the state governments allow them to exist. And so, in principle, a state government could do anything it wanted with an intransigent local government, it could vote to abolish that government. In practice, they don't. I mean, if you look at California, I think the last time California tried to abolish a local government was about 15 years ago. Is rather extraordinary situation where this locality was deemed to be unbelievably corrupt, if anybody wants the sort of backstory of it, its fictionalized somewhat in the second season of True Detective but, and even that didn't fully work, but it was just like the same five people had been governing it for decades and basically looting the city and everything, and it had like eight residents. So it was this crazy story. And so I'm curious, has the central government ever actually gone ahead and, like, pulled the rug out from under some elected officials and replaced them with commissioners such that, you know, an elected official defying a central government in New Zealand would actually say to themselves, yeah, you know, I could get the hook, that they could follow through, because I do get the sense in most American states, and certainly in California, that the local governments really aren't afraid of the state government.

Eleanor West 44:05
Yeah, I mean, this situation similar in New Zealand local government exists at central government's leisure. But I wasn't really on the scene when Auckland got amalgamated, but it's my understanding that that wasn't a popular decision amongst the Councils at the time, that that was kind of something that was forced upon them by central government. Central Government. So, I mean, councils would have had that in their recent memory that government is prepared to force them to do things. I think it would have been extremely politically brave to try and replace Auckland City Council, just because it's the biggest and most powerful Council in New Zealand. It's kind of unlike any other city council. But they did replace Tauranga City Council a few years ago. Okay, then recently, they had the opportunity to allow Tauranga to have an election, and they decided that Tauranga is not ready to govern itself, so they still have commissioners, so it's not, not empty.

Michael Manville 44:51
So, this is quite different. I mean, because if you look back at, you know, and I may be missing some things, but if you look back at the era when states were really, you know, forcing for. Instance, the mergers of cities in the US. I mean, you're going back to the late 1800s in fact, some of the case law that sort of determines this comes from forcible mergers that Pennsylvania made of some of its cities and things like that. But since then, states have been, you know, some listener who's much more up on this can correct me, I think far less aggressive and much more deferential to local authority. And I think what we have more commonly see in cases of state preemption is the state actually just kind of provides some cover for elected officials who don't want to take the blame for things. You know, they can just say, like, ah, our hands are tied. We hate those bastards at the state level, but, but not really a true showdown where the state really runs rough shot over the city,

Shane Phillips 45:42
I think the only example I can think of is Detroit actually following the global financial crisis. I don't recall if the council members were removed from office or if it was, but I recall that the governor installed some commissioners to essentially take over the city or its budget to save off bankruptcy. And that was a pretty extreme act. And I think there were, it was probably flawed in certain ways, but, yeah, the rare case,

Michael Manville 46:10
that's a good point. And I should have clarified that fiscal emergency, fiscal crisis has prompted this. So Detroit was placed in receivership. New York in the 70s, Cleveland in the 70s. These were not instances, I guess it's the distinction I was implicitly making, where a city was sort of defying a state's vision of the public good. It was more like, in that case, the state had just said, like, Oh, you're going to go bankrupt. You know.

Eleanor West 46:33
I think it would have been pretty unlikely for Auckland Council to get replaced, but I think that they knew that central government could have done something. You know they were, they were never, never clear about what exactly they were threatening. Other than that, you have our attention, and we're prepared to intervene if you don't follow the rules.

Michael Manville 46:49
Yeah, it's interesting, and it is, yeah, yeah, all right.

Shane Phillips 46:53
So that is political amalgamation, and let's call it governance, or maybe something about the electoral system as well. Next up is frustration by a higher level government with the inaction or intransigence of local governments. The amalgamation of Auckland City Council is arguably one manifestation of that frustration, but one of many. As a case study you talk about the Special Housing Areas or SHAs that were enacted in 2013 by the central government, but had limited adoption by local authorities. Can you tell us how the SHAs worked and what central government officials learned from their failure to spur real change? It seems like they concluded that incentives alone, carrots alone, were not going to be enough, and so they moved on to mandates, onto the sticks.

Eleanor West 47:41
Yea, so Special Housing Areas. They were introduced in cities around the country after the Christchurch earthquake. Around the time that the Productivity Commission, which is an independent advisory body in government, they published a report that was kind of roundly blaming restrictive land use regulations for the housing crisis. But at that time, central government didn't yet have an appetite to actually override local authorities. I think it probably would have been politically too costly. But also apparently, like I learned when I was interviewing people, there was still this perception that local authorities just needed more information and tools to help them make the right decisions, which is perhaps a bit naive in hindsight. So the idea was that central government would help local authorities identify underdeveloped areas where it would be appropriate to relax some land use regulations and fast track the consenting processes to induce more market led housing supply. But ultimately, the local authorities, they only really applied these Special Housing Areas in lower socio economic areas where there was less organized opposition to the new housing. And then the Special Housing Areas that they did apply were often too small, and they often tacked on extra affordability requirements, which kind of undermined the development potential on those sites. And then in the rare instances where it seemed like the Special Housing Areas might actually be working like developers were applying to build at higher densities, councilors would get cold feet, and then they'd revoke the Special Housing Areas. So yeah, I think central government learned an important lesson from that experiment.

Michael Manville 49:08
I think that, you know, it's very easy to think that the central government's being naive, and I sometimes have that same frustration, but I do think also it can be true at the same time, that even if you're quite cynical, you have to go through these motions, right? Like that. You have to give people the opportunity to do it the easy way before you do it the hard way, or else you just come across as being way too heavy handed. And I think, yeah, this is not a housing related thing, but a few years ago, when California was in a drought, the governor went through all sorts of motions of okay, like voluntary restrictions, and we're trusting the cities to do this, I think knowing full well that none of them are going to do it, and then it basically was just like a parent, right? It just said, like, Okay, well, you know, we gave you the opportunity to show that you were responsible enough to do this, and now you're not. And so now there's, there's statewide drought restrictions, and I think you kind of have to, otherwise people just think you're. Are a little bit, you know, power mad or something, yeah, but that does not also rule out naivete. Well, I

Eleanor West 50:05
think, I think both can be true, but I do think that I mean special housing here is one of the only experiment that happened in that, like mid 2010s period. So I think the Labor government that introduced the upzoning policies has definitely used that as a justification for these policies. People would describe them as being blunt and quite forceful, and the government would say, Well, you know, we tried and we tried to let you guys do it yourselves, but no dice. Yeah,

Shane Phillips 50:31
I mean, and this is something we've seen in California with housing itself, and I think it's why state governments have stepped in across the country. We had a couple bills in 2017 and 2018 SB, 827, and SB 50, which were up zoning bills of a scale actually comparable to more concentrated than what Auckland did, but much more ambitious than anything we've actually done here in California to date, or that any city has done in terms of the amount of up zoning. And those didn't pass, and cities uniformly opposed them and said, you know, we know how to do this. It's better to have local governments who know their communities take care of this. We're going to make sure we have enough housing. And they didn't. I mean, if you look at the reforms that have taken place across the state in the ensuing seven years or so, very little has been done, almost all of it when things have been done, they've been done at the state level. And so yeah, I think at a certain point, state officials, Federal National Government officials, just reached the entirely reasonable conclusion that local governments just are not going to solve this problem. Some may do what they need to, but there are a lot of local governments, something like 700 here in California, and even if the biggest 10 do all the right things here, it's probably still not going to be enough. And it wouldn't be fair for them to be the only ones trying to solve the problem anyway. And I guess the last thing I will say on this, and this has come up before, is I don't entirely blame local governments or local government officials for this. I see this in your research paper as well. Eleanor, some of the central government officials essentially saying, like we knew they weren't going to do this because they just faced too much political pressure. They're too exposed to political pressure in a way that we as members of the central government are not. And so it's not even necessarily blaming them. It doesn't have to be. It's just recognizing the reality of the situation and that because of the political pressures faced by many local government officials, it's just very unlikely that they're going to do what needs to be done.

Eleanor West 52:40
I think that if you go and talk to lots of people in local government in New Zealand, like elected councilors, but also like local government staff, they will tell you that central government thinks that they're all stupid and idiots and they're doing everything wrong. And then if you go and talk to central government, I mean, I'm biased, having worked in central government, but they they talk way more about the misaligned incentives, like they think it's an incentives issue. They don't. They don't think that local councilors are stupid. In fact, they think that they're quite clever. They're always finding annoying loopholes in the regulations that weren't intended to be there.

Michael Manville 53:12
That sounds completely in line to me with my experience talking to officials at both levels of government in the US. And I would just add to that, that to a local official, it is always very easy to find a state official out of touch simply because, by definition, they don't have the on the ground knowledge, right. And that's that's one reason why we have devolved so many things to local governments, is that you know they're there. But one, one result of that is that a local official can always come up with a situation or an anecdote or an example where what the state person is proposing just makes no sense, right? It doesn't work for this guy, and that is the great strength of local authority. But it also, of course, it feeds this kind of idea that the state people are just sort of pencil heads far away who think that they can sort of technocrat their way to everything.

Shane Phillips 54:02
Alright, we are running out of time here, and we still have several questions to go. But I do want to wrap up this thought by just talking a little bit about the role of local government and local examples, because you do discuss how these local examples were important to the central government officials for overcoming political resistance to their mandates. That very much meshes with my observation that many state level reforms are based on local implementation of similar policies, and they are then justified in part by the positive experiences that follow, or at least the absence of the terrible negative experiences that are predicted by the opponents. Could you tell us about how the medium density residential standards were lifted and shifted, in the words of one of the policy's champions, from the local level to the national.

Eleanor West 54:51
So the medium density residential standards is that policy that allows three homes up to three stories on any section by right. So one of the architects was. Policy had been following California's attempts actually to ban single family zoning, and was very inspired to try and do the same here. And by this point, it was clear that the Auckland Unitary Plan was successfully inducing new housing supply, and there was also this sense that Aucklanders were becoming more accepting of density, and that the Auckland Unitary Plan was increasingly viewed positively. So central government politicians thought that perhaps they could simply lift and shift the medium density zone from the Auckland Unitary Plan and require it to be applied as the baseline minimum zone across all major urban areas around the country. So it was an attempt to make abolishing single family zoning more palatable. So one of my interviewees said we were trying to use as a precedent something that had been done well so they didn't actually end up using the Auckland zone exactly as was. They simplified it a bit for the medium density residential standards, but it's essentially it was Auckland Unitary Plan inspired. I do think it's also kind of important to note, though, that the Auckland Unitary Plan and also Christchurch, they were both really important for proving empirically that relaxing land use regulations actually works. So the evidence from those local cases was really critical to making the case for the central upzoning policies, and this evidence was used in the cost benefit analysis, and that analysis won over several of the skeptics in cabinet, apparently,

Shane Phillips 56:13
yeah, that's an important point. You often hear in the US that up zoning won't matter because a million different reasons, but because, for example, developers actually don't want to build more housing because it increases competition, and they make more money by keeping housing scarce, and so being able to actually show no look, we did this thing, and developers did, in fact, build more housing, and it was more diverse types of housing. It had these effects on affordability. All of that is nice to know as well, but just as a starting point, knowing that relaxing these land use restrictions actually results in more housing production is really, really essential. Yeah,

Eleanor West 56:50
and its New Zealand evidence, right? Because in New Zealand, we like to think that we're special, and evidence from overseas doesn't apply in New Zealand because everything is different. So it was New Zealand specific evidence. I think that part was important.

Shane Phillips 57:03
Yeah, it's very important.

Eleanor West 57:06
We're all special.

Michael Manville 57:08
In Los Angeles, Glendale evidence doesn't count.

Shane Phillips 57:09
Exactly, much less Texas or another country. Okay, next up is a non partisan advocacy effort by those outside of government. Tell us about the efforts to make housing reform activism a broad non partisan coalition, something that incorporated everything from a mostly right wing private email group all the way to generation zero, which you mentioned, a mostly left wing climate activism group. Why was this decision to be non partisan, or act non partisan ly made. And then the really difficult question, How did folks actually manage to hold that coalition together?

Eleanor West 57:47
Yeah, so I think that a lot of the advocacy on this stuff really started with economists, and they tend to err a little bit conservative, but they're also the kind of people that are quite happy to talk to anyone who will listen to them. So there was this email group in the early 2010s where some economists and general zoning reform enthusiasts, they were workshopping policy ideas with each other, and they were kind of roping in anyone who seemed the slightest bit interested. So that included Phil Twyford from the left wing Labor Party, who was one of the later architects for the upzoning policies. Twyford is a really interesting guy. He is a big, big policy nerd, and he seems kind of unbounded by the constraints of his party's ideology, like he was out there looking for effective policy options on the housing crisis, and he was receptive to good advice regardless of where it came from. And unlike a lot of his labor colleagues, he didn't think that the market was a scary bogeyman. So then this upzoning idea, it also got picked up by generation zero of that climate action group I mentioned earlier during the Auckland Unitary Plan debates. So generation zero was a really strange organization in comparison to the wider climate movement. So their first big Advocacy Project was the zero carbon act, and they really wanted this to be enduring, which meant they needed to secure bipartisan support for it before it went to Parliament. So right from the start, one of generation zero's founding principles was non partisanship, like they very intentionally set themselves up with policy wonk corporate vibes in effort to be more appealing and effective advocates across the political spectrum, which work quite well. And you say when you ask your question, Shane, that generation zero is a mostly left wing organization. I think that that they do give off that impression sometimes. But like, I know, when I joined, it was very clearly explained to me that if I had any like affiliations to political parties, then I wasn't allowed to have a front facing role with generation zero. Like they were very strict about that. They wanted you to be outwardly non partisan. So they and then later we, we worked quite hard to avoid politicizing zoning reform. When we were campaigning on this issue, like, really, it was about establishing a vibe we wanted to present a united front. So we were really consciously trying to keep our campaign platform narrow and focusing on where our asks intersected with, like, for instance, those more conservative economists like we were focusing on. Taxing land use regulations to enable growth up, and we quite actively avoided talking about growth out in public, because there were tensions there with the climate change contingent on one side, and then the housing affordability economists contingent on the other. So we were trying pretty hard to engage with each other in good faith, like if we were to host an event, we would invite representatives from all the political parties. If we were organizing a panel session, we'd have climate activists alongside policy wonks from right wing think tanks and on social media. We were trying to be balanced in our engagement on both sides of the political spectrum. So like we tried to rip bad positions or praise good positions in equal measure. So it was really important to be in regular contact with allies in all camps. Like to know their positions and identify points of agreement, and conversely, points of disagreement, like which topics to avoid getting caught in public debate over you have to be open to conversation. Be prepared to make compromise in pursuit of a collective goal and build trust. Be professional. Don't get high on drama. Avoid alienating people. Essentially, try to be a normal and likable person. And as we would say in New Zealand, don't be a dick.

Michael Manville 1:01:04
Didn't know that was a uniquely New Zealand sounds like a great place, though.

Shane Phillips 1:01:11
It really does.

Eleanor West 1:01:13
Something else I think is important, though, and I don't know how conscious an effort this was, but the neutrality of the public service in New Zealand was leveraged really effectively too. So there was a lot of effort, like, particularly from economists, to try and persuade civil servants like they're not political appointees in New Zealand. So having an independent advisory body, like a Productivity Commission recommending up zoning really helped position this as a non partisan issue. So whichever party was in government could easily just say, Oh, this is good policy. It's been recommended to us by independent experts. Like its not a political thing. It's just what political thing, it's just what the experts are telling us to do. So we'd better do it.

Shane Phillips 1:01:45
My biggest takeaways from this is, don't be a dick, though. I just gotta say.

Eleanor West 1:01:50
I think that's a lesson that activists in every scenario could learn, to be honest.

Michael Manville 1:01:56
Regardless of affiliation, and to, you know, be a bit more specific than that is also just to be willing to set aside irrelevant differences with a group to advance a particular cause. I think there is a tendency in US activist circles, or the US political circles, to kind of look at someone and be like, Oh, even if this person's with me on housing, I disagree with them on climate or the Middle East or something like that, and therefore we can't work together. I just have to have a fight with them, which is an understandable human impulse, and also a recipe for getting nothing done.

Eleanor West 1:02:27
Yeah, it's the same in New Zealand, like we really didn't want upzoning to become part of the Omni cause, you know, yeah. And like, we were quite lucky that we, generation Zero has had quite a big influence on the wider urbanism scene, just because they were so early to the party with org, the unitary plan, that, I guess, like, urbanism has been one area where we've actually been able to keep that quite separate from the omni cause. That's good, but I mean, it comes from both sides, right, like we've had people who are, you know, part of, like, the right wing, conservative spectrum of advocacy, and they've also been really open and willing to work with us.

Shane Phillips 1:03:01
The last of the conditions that I wanted to talk about was the timing of all of this, but since we are running out of time, I will just say what I was thinking on this one and what you wrote about, which is essentially that, because a lot of this policy making took place at the same time as COVID lockdowns, people were a little bit distracted. And you know, the old quote about never letting a crisis go to waste certainly applied here to some extent. And the MDRS in particular, was passed. A lot of these policies were passed with as little fanfare as possible, drawing as little attention to them as possible. There are, I don't know, government transparency concerns with that a little bit. I don't know how much people should try to duplicate this precisely, but I just want to note that that was one more thing that came up here, and is probably important to some extent getting to our last few questions, though, unfortunately, New Zealand's center right National Party turned against the medium density residential standards under pressure by a further right party act, and national now leads the central government. The good news is that their pledge to repeal MDRs has been softened to a plan to make it optional for local authorities that demonstrate they've zoned for at least 30 years of growth, and that's a lot of growth. I suspect that demonstrating that capacity could be more challenging than simply accepting the MDRs for many jurisdictions, where do things stand today and are there any lessons to be learned about the political durability of these kinds of reforms? Yeah,

Eleanor West 1:04:30
so a few councils have already adopted the MDRs into their plans, like on time, there was a schedule within which they had to do that. Some of them, Christchurch, for instance, are dragging their heels. They're still waiting to see what the government's plan to make it optional will look like, I guess. But I think, I guess, in terms of lessons to be learned, I think it's sometimes that it's just a case of two steps forward, one step back, right? Like, to be honest, I was working at HUD when the medium density residential standards went through, and I would say that there was just this general sense of art. Disbelief, even as it was happening.

Shane Phillips 1:05:01
This is the New Zealand HUD, by the way, correct?

Eleanor West 1:05:06
Yeah. New Zealand HUD, Housing and Urban Development, yeah. I think it was too good to be real, right? Like, I've always thought of that policy as icing on the cake, or a sacrificial lamb. It was so ambitious, people didn't even question the first policy anymore, which was also hugely ambitious. So I think the MDRs, it pushed the envelope, perhaps a little too far too quickly. I think that there's a limit to how much regulatory stick you can apply without also offering carrots. And there are things we could be doing in New Zealand to make people more supportive of new housing in the first place, like top of mind would be addressing the decades of under investment in the urban infrastructure needed to actually support that new housing more neighbors shouldn't have to mean more congestion and competition for local amenities. So I think we probably need to back off sticks for a while and go a bit hard on carrots.

Shane Phillips 1:05:51
And looking beyond the reforms discussed in your paper and beyond New Zealand. How do you see the policy mobilities evolving over the past few years? I personally take every opportunity I can to talk about the really ambitious and laudable zoning reforms that have happened over the past year in Spokane, Washington, Burlington, Vermont and Sacramento, California, along with a still pretty small list of others. And I suspect Auckland's experience influenced some of those US cities. I'm sure there is more to come. But to date, what do you think is the International legacy of New Zealand's land use reforms?

Eleanor West 1:06:27
Well, I think the first thing I'd say is that the political bravery that got us to this point in New Zealand, I think, is quite inspiring. So the bipartisan deal has crumbled a bit, sure, but to quote one of the politicians I interviewed, he said, basically, there is now, like, cross party consensus across central government anyway, that councils should be much more permissive about housing supply, so at least we're working away in the right policy areas. So there's that, I think, that, you know, politicians standing up and agreeing to support something that they believe in, in a really principled move. I find that quite inspiring.

Shane Phillips 1:06:59
And we didn't really talk about that. But I do think having a political leader, someone to champion these things is really important. And I think you talk about different people who played that role, maybe concurrently at different times, leaders of the party, Philip and maybe some others, yeah. And I want

Eleanor West 1:07:15
to believe that other countries, politicians there can look to New Zealand and be like, Oh, these guys tried this, and they didn't get tar and feathered. So maybe we can do it here and it'll be okay, but I definitely think the biggest legacy is going to be the evidence base for up zoning that we've developed in New Zealand, because as far as I'm aware, Auckland was the first test case for broad upzoning globally. And by broad, I mean not just along transit corridors or targeted into particular suburbs. And this distinction is really important, because broad up zoning that raises building height limits across a large area is really important for housing affordability outcomes. So targeted upzoning, when you only raise building height limits in small areas, it adds value to those sections in those areas, because the owners get permission to do more with their land, and developers will pay more for those permissions, especially when the permissions are rare. So while targeted up zoning does enable more housing supply, it also makes the price of land and the houses on it spike, which is not so great for affordability. But if we up zone all of the land, the sections that have permission to build at higher densities, they won't be as scarce, and so there'll be less competition to buy them, so we'll get more housing supply, which is great for affordability, but the price of land won't spike as much

Shane Phillips 1:08:22
you're speaking my language.

Michael Manville 1:08:24
I mean, the I think the other thing I would add to this is that it seems that Auckland's up zoning really was an up zoning, you know, and that's what gives it the evidence base. And I think California and other places too, are on a little bit of a vicious circle where, in principle, they pass an up zoning, but working its way through the legislature, there's enough poison pills attached to the bill that it becomes very difficult to use. And our quote, unquote abolition of single family zoning is a great example that technically, there's no Area in California right now that is only sort of reserved for detached single family homes, because you can build up to four units on a single family parcel. But the conditions you have to meet to do that are particularly onerous, one of them being that, like, the owner occupant just has to be living there the whole time. And so really, like, nobody uses this law, you know, developers build housing that not like random single family homeowner, guy who's gonna just, like, knock over what he's living in and then still retain the residence and put up three more houses. And so as a result of that, this sort of halfway measure, we actually have a bad evidence base, right, where we passed laws and then people said, well, no one uses them. And so I think it's really important that Auckland was able to actually, like, carry the ball over the goal line and pass a law someone could use because that's what gives you that evidence base that people can point to and say, like, Well, this was effective. If you only get 75% of the way there, it's almost the worst of all worlds.

Eleanor West 1:09:49
Yeah, and I think that evidence is penetrating internationally. Like I was at the Urban Economics Association Conference in Copenhagen recently, and it was really cool to sit in. Sessions on land use regulations and see Ryan's work evaluating the impacts of the Auckland unitary plan being cited on people's slides, left, right and center. So I reckon that evidence from the Auckland Unitary Plan experiment and probably the up zoning policies too, once they bid in, that's going to be used to justify a slew of zoning policy reforms around the world.

Shane Phillips 1:10:19
One can hope. All right, Eleanor West, thank you for your work on this and thank you for coming on the Housing Voice Podcast.

Eleanor West 1:10:26
Thanks for having me.

Shane Phillips 1:10:32
You can read more about Eleanor's work on our website lewis.ucla.edu. Show notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials. I'm on blue sky at Shane D Phillips, and Mike is on Twitter at Michael Manville. Six, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

About the Guest Speaker(s)

Eleanor West

Eleanor West is a Research Associate at the University of Auckland Economic Policy Center and former policy advisor in the New Zealand Civil Service.

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