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Thursday 18 April 2019 4:54pm

Plan-1-
Emily McEwan, left, receives the New Zealand Planning Institute’s Wallace Ross Award for research from NZPI Board Chair Karyn Sinclair in Napier earlier this month.

Geography alumna Emily McEwan received the prestigious New Zealand Planning Institute’s Wallace Ross Award for research at the 2019 NZPI conference in Napier on April 6.

The NZPI says McEwan’s study is of value to the planning profession because it challenges the evidence base for a national planning document and explores the issue of political bias in decision-making regarding housing affordability.

The Dunedin resident gained the award for her 2018 Master of Planning thesis, entitled The National Policy Statement on Urban Development Capacity: An effective tool to improve housing affordability in New Zealand?

The key findings of her thesis study were that:

  • The National Policy Statement on Urban Development Capacity (NPS-UDC) was based on flawed and biased evidence;
  • The biased approach may stem from ideology and politics; and
  • The NPS-UDC is unlikely to be effective in improving housing affordability.

McEwan says a summer internship at the Dunedin City Council working on new rezoning applications from the public prompted an interest in the ramifications of the NPS-UDC, which was introduced in 2016. 

The NPS-UDC, developed in relation to the Resource Management Act 1991, sets the general policy direction for local government regarding the provision of ‘development capacity’ for housing and businesses; the key driver of the policy statement is improving housing affordability in New Zealand by requiring local authorities to increase the supply of land for housing and to allow for greater density of development.

“The rationale was that local authorities had been unduly restricting development capacity, which had contributed to house prices increasing through lack of housing supply. By requiring local government to soften their restrictions, it was thought that house prices would soften too, contributing to improved housing affordability,” she says. 

As McEwan examined a range of factors that could cause house prices to increase, it became apparent that local government restrictions were likely to be one of the less significant variables.

Strong evidence “from the literature” revealed that factors – such as international economic conditions, interest rates, taxation, net migration, investment in housing for capital gain, land-banking by developers, and the expectation that house prices would continue to rise – were much more important factors in causing increasing house prices, she says.

To investigate how the NPS-UDC was arrived at as a tool to improve housing affordability, she analysed a range of reports produced prior to its development, including the 2012 Housing Affordability Inquiry, the 2015 Using Land for Housing Inquiry (both by the New Zealand Productivity Commission), and others evaluating the likely effectiveness and impacts of the proposed NPS-UDC.

The overall finding of this analysis was that:

  • Although the reports demonstrated a clear recognition of the wide range of variables influencing housing affordability, there was a very selective focus when it came to identifying the problems.
  • There was a strong emphasis on the supply-side response of the housing market, rather than on what was driving demand. Constraints imposed by the planning system on supply were a particular focus.
  • This emphasis was inconsistent with the wider literature on house price dynamics and relied on a selective evidence-base.
  • Serious limitations were identified with the modelling undertaken to establish the likely effectiveness of the NPS-UDC in relation to housing affordability.

Through interviews with local authority planners across the country, and an assessment of further literature, it became apparent that political motivations and neoliberal ideology were likely to be factors influencing the approach to the evidence and the response to the housing affordability problem.

“In particular, focussing on improving the responsiveness of housing supply to demand and the removal of planning regulations are typical of neoliberalism, which prefers ‘free market’ functioning.

“Politically, there is always considerable pressure on government from the development community to reduce planning constraints, and pressure from homeowners for the value of their properties to continue increasing (as their main investment). Therefore, a policy response which looked like it might improve housing affordability but would be relatively ineffective (while also freeing restrictions on development), could be seen as politically expedient.”

Before returning to study, McEwan operated and owned a residential landscape design company in Dunedin for seven years. In future she may undertake further planning-related academic research, which may examine further investigations of housing affordability, the way housing affordability is measured and the modelling of policy effectiveness.

She is also interested in topics on managing urban encroachment on key areas of food-producing land, and the effects of residential visitor accommodation through platforms such as AirBnB on the availability of housing to residents.

McEwan says receiving the Wallace Ross award for research “makes all the hard work seem so much more worthwhile.”

“Undertaking research can be a very insular experience; you spend months at a time immersed in the details of your topic. Now that the work is completed and I have had the chance to share my findings with those in the planning profession, it is really exciting to see it has been so positively received."

Read more about the Master of Planning here.

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