All is not yet lost for the Queenstown Lakes District Council Plan Change 24 - Community Housing, but next month's meeting in Wanaka will be critical, Councillor Cath Gilmour says.
Speaking to the Otago Daily Times yesterday after an extraordinary meeting in Queenstown where the council, in a shock move, voted to seek legal advice about the process and implications of withdrawing from the plan change, Cr Gilmour said she was hoping "maybe people's views might change over the next month".
"I think it would be a fundamental mistake to throw away Plan Change 24."
The plan change would only be applied to greenfields sites where residential development had not been envisaged, with a percentage of affordable housing seen as the economic imperative for the community.
"It's not a tax on all development; it's only a way of making sure the community is making some gains when they're seeing a huge change in their environment as a result of development and facing infrastructure costs.
"If land is zoned residential or commercial, everyone knows it [development] can happen.
"But, if you get what was paddocks becoming a community of 1000 houses, that has an impact on the community."
If the council voted next month to withdraw from the plan change, it would lose its "primary weapon in our armoury" for making developers think about affordable housing. Without PC24, it would be relying on developers' goodwill to provide affordable and community housing, she said.
However, Remarkables Park Ltd (RPL) developer Alastair Porter said last night he had "no doubt" developers would make good on their promise to try to find a solution to "affordable community".
"It is a very narrow plan change - it only deals with affordable housing and it doesn't look at the issue of affordable community."
Mr Porter said that under PC24, a proposed development north of the Eastern Access Rd would have resulted in about 51 units required to be "gifted" to the council for affordable housing.
That would have come at a cost of about $20 million - a cost that would ultimately have been passed on to the consumer.
