Posts by Graham Dunster
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Tamara,
Tomorrow is the last chance to submit on the Draft Unitary Plan. Totally true.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Tommy Honey,
"Those opposing it would rather have no plan at all"
Possibly true for some/many, but as Russell has pointed out, this is the start of the consultation process for the new city, it has to start somewhere. As unfair and, I think, untrue to dismiss all the protestors as to dismiss the intensifiers. Everyone wants a plan, few of us actually have one ready made.
The Melbourne comparison is apposite - from my Grey Lynn vantage point (actually in the valley) let's avoid demolishing the city's history willy-nilly and instead move all those car yards on the Great North Road ridge and build some quality apartments with the best views in the city rather than a massive Bunnings with a four metre wall to the road. The vibrant Ponsonby Road and New North Road, Kingsland environments can and should be replicated in an area and a way that will continue to reinvigorate the central city fringes. I want to be able to walk to cafés, restaurants and shops, not drive.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
Who knows, all those MPs from Auckland electorates may even start remembering who put them in the beehive...
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Absolutely agree that this feedback time is consultation but must reiterate that it is only really late in the piece that any clarity has come about the process. With Council having called for the plan, in whatever form it eventually takes, to be final and unable to be challenged from September this year, many of us remain deeply concerned. Your example of Elgin Street illustrates the communication issue, the section between Great North Road and Williamson Avenue is to be Single House, the section between Williamson Avenue and Grey Lynn Park is to be Mixed Housing. Go and have a look and there's no difference in the houses. Thus the plea for reassessment of any structure built before the 1944 cutoff date, before the ability to demolish without notification kicks in.
The memory of the crap apartments and leaky homes built under the watchful and caring eye of the now vanished Auckland City Council is there to remind us that, despite the best intentions of the governing parties, without sane, enforceable rules and regulations it is foolish to put one's trust in developers.
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For we Grey Lynn residents the issue is the incredibly arbitrary new zoning. There has been no notice taken of geographical realities (cliffs, unstable ground, springs etc) and part of the existing roads around Elgin and Dickens Streets and Grey Lynn Park is completely wrong, quite bizarre. If there was consultation by the Council before the DAUP publication we missed it. The fear is that these issues could be widespread and how will we know?
I have spoken to many people who are, on the whole, in agreement with the need to plan for and provide for intensification. The caveat is to do it transparently, in consultation and with concurrent facility and infrastructure improvements. Without a belief that this will happen in a civilised and inclusive fashion the natural reaction is to yell STOP! Experiences with previous councils and observing the farcical way that the National national government is behaving (locally and nationally) also adds to the pot pourri of concern.
Auckland has already destroyed way too much heritage in the form of buildings, until an in-depth reassessment of what remains happens nothing should be irrevocably changed.
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"Of course, for such a purpose, existing houses have to be demolished. If the house has been built before 1944, an attempt to demolish it would be automatically notified and would require resource consent. This isn’t the case at the moment. If you live in an older neighbourhood, the Unitary Plan strengthens character protection."
Not so. If you are zoned as MH demolition does not have to be notified.
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Hard News: The Messenger God, in reply to Lilith __,
nah, those collections of squares in newspapers. Possibly I was attempting to be too oblique...
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_My experience of pre-mobile-phone public transport is people staring into space without making eye contact. Not much of a loss._
Cross words.
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Hard News: The Messenger God, in reply to Russell Brown,
It's not the writing, it's the sending...
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OnPoint: What Andrew Geddis Said, But…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
My beef with the DAUP is that is has not had wide, or any in my experience, consultation. The planners, from my privilged Grey Lynn redoubt (which ajudged a slum when I moved her 24 years ago), seem to have created an intensification future without reference to local topography, history, culture or reality. They even use a map that is incorrect, probably in more ways than I can identify. Check out Grey Lynn Park and see that they show roads that don't exist and miss out others that do. If I and my suburb are to be used as the crosscheckers on this procedure then I would like to be certain that our responses are included. If the rest of the DAUP is as badly done as this area Auckland is in big trouble.
If the national government operates this way too then we are really in a bad space.