The really big issue, especially with the prioritisation of development on the outskirts of the current urban areas, is that councils cannot afford the infrastructure costs to serve these new homes.

I’ll refer to a live Auckland example that I know well. The Supporting Growth programme, led by NZTA and Auckland Transport, has been planning the necessary transport corridors for the next 30 odd years of housing development. The aim is to protect these corridors so that they don’t get built out thus reducing future construction costs, and to give developers clear signals about where the government agencies will invest and in what order.

They are currently submitting notices of requirement. This creates present day property liabilities. There is, however, not enough money to meet the required property purchases and this is completely undeveloped land that we are talking about. The remaining land will be even more expensive in the future. There absolutely will not be enough money in the future to actually build all of the transport infrastructure without some significant funding regime changes, and this is just one example, in Auckland, for transport. It is compounded across all of the high growth urban areas and other horizontal infrastructure like the 3 waters.

So far I’ve only talked about the pure financial cost, but there are other economics costs due to the increase in car travel that will occur. More deaths and serious injuries, higher levels of congestion, increased greenhouse gas and other pollution emissions, etc.

There is a reason that so many professions have been calling for greater intensification and the MDRS, while it wasn’t perfect, was a much better solution AND was originally bi-partisan.

I’m all for housing intensification in cities and flooding the market, but for the love of god can they please invest in improving public and alternative transport infrastructure? I already hate returning to visit Auckland due to how bad the traffic is

Yup.

It's weird that National are doing more about housing affordability than Labour, given that National are typically the party of business, while Labour are supposed to, you know, look after the working class

And there is nothing in that proposition that is especially difficult to do, meaning it will probably happen.

This is obviously just a ploy to make some developers richer.

You say this as though "housing developers" are one entity that works together, rather than a group of businesses all competing with each other, and not necessarily all that fond of the competition.

#1 & #2 does feel like a bit of a gift to the folks who got in some years ago and banked land on the boundaries. Explains why an apple orchard down the road felled all the trees and just left them there - no new grafts or anything; the block got bought by a major property developer who must have seen the chances of either a zoning change or removal of the urban/rural zone coming.

Sprawl typically also means fewer 200+m2 houses on larger blocks of land when looking at opening up public spaces and building denser housing close to public transport is a better solution for long term transport emissions.

Isn't the whole point of the legislation encouraging just what you're suggesting though?