Mayor offers assurances that the elected wing would urgently address the city's housing crisis
The Hamilton City Council has been considering the withdrawal of two proposed changes to the city’s district plan – resulting in criticism.
The proposals, Plan Change 6 and Plan Change 11, aim to put more houses into the same space quickly.
Thomas Gibbons, director of McCaw Lewis, commented that Hamilton needs the plans as it continues to face a housing crisis – with the 2019 Waikato Plan revealing a shortage of 4,000 houses in the city.
“It's a real shame that the plan changes have been abandoned or partly abandoned because there is a real need for the city to continue its focus on intensification, and that needs to happen sooner rather than later because we are in a housing crisis,” Gibbons told Stuff.co.nz. “It's short-sighted to abandon these proposals at this stage with no clarity around how the city is, in fact, going to create the platform to deliver the housing that we need.”
Read more: Coronavirus: Waikato property listings plummet
Hamilton Mayor Paula Southgate offered assurances that their elected wing is committed to addressing the city’s housing crisis quickly.
“[The] council is absolutely 100% behind getting intensification as part of the growth of the city. We just think that given this council holds a slightly different view than the previous one about how that should happen, we needed to have one single conversation, not bits and pieces of different plans,” Southgate said, as reported by Stuff.co.nz.
“The housing crisis has not gone away and, when we get through the immediate COVID-19 challenge and start rebuilding the economy, I'm firmly focused on making sure that we do development that allows for affordable housing.”
