This plan follows the approach of Auckland and Canterbury regional councils who are convinced that their populations should live in high density cities crowded behind the fencing wire curtain they call their "Metropolitan Urban Limit" or "Green Belt". 

We oppose this plan for the following reasons;

1. Councils across the country grappling with areas of high population growth are favouring ‘Smart Growth’ policies which we believe are inappropriate. Internationally were such policy has been implemented they have proven to be flawed.

2. The structure plan does not outline proposed rules and methods to control the proposed zones and therefore it provides insufficient detail as to the economic impacts of the proposal. We do not believe it is a sound approach to consult the community without giving greater understanding of the implications

3. Smart Growth delivers Carpet-Sprawl because even the most rigorous Smart Growth city eventually has to extend its Metropolitan Urban Limit to provide more land for residential, commercial and industrial use. In recent times the Mayors of both Waitakere City and Manukau City have pleaded for extensions to their MULs. Even Smart Growth planners acknowledge these “adjustments” will be necessary from time to time. The sequence of events is as follows:

• The MUL is initially set to allow for the next period of growth to take place within the existing “urban form”.

• Eventually this enclosed area fills to the point where there is essentially no zoned land left for further growth or it has become so expensive that no one can afford to use it.

• In the meantime many activities have simply leap-frogged into territory outside the Smart Growth planners’ jurisdiction, which is why Northland Region is now growing so rapidly.

• Open space inside the MUL is sacrificed to high density carpet development to “save” open space outside the MUL.

• At some point the situation becomes intolerable and the people and their representatives demand an extension of the MUL to enclose some piece of surrounding rural land.

• Once this “bulge” is made legal then development and intensification begins again until the new “bulge” is also full of high density carpet development and some relief is allowed in some other part of the urban area. Obviously, as this process is repeated the city or town expands into the rural area as medium or high density “carpet sprawl.” The only difference from the post-war sprawl is that there will be a greater variety of housing types because the market demand is more varied and regulations covering section sizes and housing types have been relaxed since the sixties and the overall density will be higher.

4. A city, which Kerikeri could become, is a complex system. We cannot predict the behaviour of such systems because their future behaviour changes dramatically with only a small change in inputs. However, the behaviour of such systems is not “random” or “chaotic” in the traditional sense of the word. These chaotic systems are self-evolving and exhibit high levels of spontaneous order. Life itself is the best example of a complex chaotic system exhibiting spontaneous order. Life has no “head office” because it does not need one. The beauty of such systems is that they are adaptive, and respond to changes in their environment, and will normally self-correct if left alone.

5. The history of urban planning is a history of people trying to impose “simple” patterns over urban areas with the aim of creating some form of order. The potentially harmful extension of this pattern imposition occurs when “master planners” attempt to force these metropolitan areas into “order” by directing and controlling the use of land to meet some pre-determined pattern or idealized “urban form”. Such interventions in chaotic systems normally make the perceived “problem” worse, or generate new ones, because such systems respond and reconfigure themselves in unexpected ways.

6. One simple model of urban form is the “Manhattan Model” in which a high-density core is surrounded by lower-density development. Many people love New York and its skyline even though no one designed the skyline. It’s a fine example of spontaneous order. The other is the London model – in which there is no dominant high-density centre but only a group of villages distributed within an extensive “central area”. London has no readily identifiable “heart” but this has never distressed Londoners or any of the people who continue to flock to visit, live and work there.

7. After the Second World War Auckland City was developing along the London model with numerous villages developing on the ridges of Parnell, Ponsonby and Karangahape Road, and at village nodes such as Remuera, Mt Eden and Greenlane, and Tamaki Drive. The City Council was dominated by the Queen Street Business Association who saw these villages as “competition” and hence wanted to focus development on Queen Street. They saw a motorway system as a means of sustaining this highly centralised model. When De Leuw Cather, the traffic engineers from San Francisco, designed the proposed motorway system they responded to the actual multi-nodal nature of Auckland and distributed the traffic around the ridges to enable Auckland to continue its spontaneous “natural” development. The city fathers rejected this approach in favour of the present “solution” intended to concentrate traffic and activity in the City’s “heart”. The resulting congestion and the poor design of the interchanges actually hastened decentralization. Manukau City, Waitakere City, North Shore, and Albany have grown more rapidly than would probably have been the case had the de Leuw Cather scheme been accepted.

8. Smart Growth has the same “unexpected” outcomes. For example the American States with the strongest anti-sprawl rules have the highest rates of urban sprawl. People simply leap-frog to more remote locations, and in New Zealand, may even move to other countries. We should accept that our large population areas will be low density, multi-nodal cities or towns, that density has no intrinsic merit, and delivers no benefits in its own right. Different densities should reflect people’s preferences for diverse housing types, but nothing more. Density is a measure, not a goal – although density measurement has always been an attractive tool to those determined to Rule. We should then let villages like Kerikeri be and let them achieve their being.

9. Smart Growth strategies actually damage biodiversity. There have been numerous reports from the UK over the last several years clearly establishing that the English suburban garden embodies the greatest biodiversity in the UK environment. Similar studies in New Zealand would almost certainly find that our own greatest biodiversity is in established suburban gardens in and around our towns and cities, and increasingly in the wide variety of small-farms and lifestyle blocks in peri-urban and rural areas. The medium and high-density housing, which dominates Smart Growth development, and in which lawns and gardens are replaced with paving, pebbles and cactus, are the real Dead Zones. Hence, any alternatives to Smart Growth should enable individual landowners and developers to enhance and promote biodiversity. While ordinary gardens go some way to achieving superior biodiversity, District Plan rules can also encourage the repair, restoration and enhancement of natural and native vegetation, watercourses and wetlands, and so generally promote sustainable development as defined in the RMA.

10. They say time is money but a lot depends on whose time and whose money. What this structure plan will create is cost for those who wish to undertake innovative activity outside the prescribed boundaries. To give an international example, in most parts of the United States housing is quite affordable. But in some places housing prices are astronomical – three times the national average. In California the San Mateo County Planning Commission has spent five years deciding what can and cannot be done with the site of an old racetrack that is no longer economically viable. That is more time than it took to build the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge or the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb. None of this delay has cost the members of the Planning Commission a cent. That is why the delay is still continuing. But whatever is finally done with the racetrack site will be vastly more expensive because five years of delay are not cheap. Such delays are not uncommon in the more politically correct parts of California. Permission to build an apartment complex near San Francisco has taken even longer. Whoever ends up living in those apartments will have to pay far higher rents as a result. A recent study indicates that one-fifth of new home-buyers in California pay at least half of their income for housing. So do nearly one-fourth of California renters. When it costs half of what you make just to put a roof over your head, it is a big restriction on what else you can afford to do.

11. It is a very different story in most of the rest of the United States. A scholarly study published in the October 2005 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics concluded:

"In the sprawling cities of the American heartland, land remains cheap, real construction costs are falling, and expanding supply keeps housing costs low."

In some American cities, housing prices have actually declined as the housing supply has expanded. None of this is rocket science. It is supply and demand. Why then are there particular places where housing costs have skyrocketed? In those places, much of the land is prevented by law from being used to build housing. These land use restrictions are seldom called land use restrictions. They are called by much prettier names, like "open space" laws, laws to "preserve farmland" or prevent "sprawl," "greenbelt" laws – or whatever else will sell politically.

12. People who already own their own homes don't worry about whether such laws will drive housing prices sky high. Somebody else will have to pay those prices while existing homeowners see the value of their property rise by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, land that might otherwise provide homes for others becomes in effect free park land for themselves, while such upscale communities use "open space" laws to keep out the masses. The crowning touch is that such self-interest is depicted as idealism.

13. A famous economist named Joseph Schumpeter once said that the first thing someone will do for his ideals is lie. Some people distinguish little white lies from black lies but the biggest lies of all are green lies. To hear environmental zealots tell it, they are just trying to save the last few patches of greenery from being paved over. But in fact the land area of the United States covered by forests is more than three times as large as the land area covered by all the cities and towns across the nation. Only about 5 percent of the land is urban. In other words, you could double the size of every city and town in America and still nine-tenths of the land would be undeveloped. In New Zealand our urban areas are less than 2 percent.

14. Some of the biggest hysteria about "saving" land is found in places where most of the land is already off-limits to building. Some of the biggest crocodile tears about a need to "preserve farmland" come from people who are not farmers, and who know little and care less about farming. As in the case for the Kerikeri-Waipapa Structure Plan. Their real agenda is keeping out other people. Home builders who would enable other people to move into their community are called selfish and greedy. Green liars consider themselves morally far superior to "developers."

15. In the United States you require 3.2 times per capita income to purchase a home but in New Zealand it has climbed to over 6 times because of the common use of the planning strategy being contemplated for Kerikeri. This is in a district that has the lowest per capita income in New Zealand.

16. How did this situation come about and why does it continue? Part of the reason is that it is newcomers who have to pay outrageous prices for houses, while it is existing homeowners who vote for laws and policies that drive up housing costs by obstructing the building of new homes. Those who already own their own homes are not hurt by soaring housing prices. In fact, they benefit when the value of their homes becomes several times what they originally paid for them.

17. Given this situation and these incentives, it is easy to understand why such things as planning departments, "open space" laws and "historical preservation" policies proliferate. These road-blocks to building are essentially idealistic-sounding ways of being completely selfish.

18. The human consequences of artificially expensive housing extend even to some of the affluent people living in communities with sky-high housing costs. For example, elderly people in such communities — especially those who are ailing and homebound — are often isolated from their children. Young adults who have not yet reached their peak earnings years usually cannot afford to live in such communities near their parents, unless they live in their parents' homes. People like teachers and policemen, whom every community must have, can seldom afford to live where they work, when housing costs are out of sight, and so must commute from a long way away, sometimes spending hours a day driving to and from work on crowded highways.

19. Artificially expensive housing also drives up rates and for those on fixed incomes this becomes so much of a burden they are forced to vacate their homes for cheaper areas. This is already a problem in many parts of the Far North.