Housing Minister Chris Bishop yesterday outlined plans to "flood the market" with opportunities for housing development, including establishing housing growth targets, to be determined, for tier 1 and 2 councils, requiring them to "live-zone" development capacity to provide for at least 30 years’ housing demand at any one time.
The Queenstown Lakes District and Dunedin City Councils are tier 2.
However, Mr Lewers — who had not read the full details yesterday — questioned how realistic the plan was.
He said the pace and release of development were determined by developers once they were given consent — and there were no incentives for them to cease their practice of "drip-feeding" homes to the market.
The council already had 30 years’ zoned land available, but it was not "infrastructure-ready" because that required existing ratepayers to front-foot the cost of future growth, Mr Lewers said.
"If they’re suggesting that we should actually provide infrastructure to allow 30 years of development, that is a massive, massive cost on council books and then we’d have to have a very serious conversation about it."
That cost burden was already holding back housing development, he said.
There were already some "motivated developers" keen to provide housing in the district, "but we’re in a financial position where we can’t probably provide all the infrastructure to all these different developers all at the same time".
"We’ve got to stage it so we’re within our debt limits and we’re not burdening current ratepayers with infrastructure growth debt."
Mr Bishop said, long-term, his objective was for the cost of infrastructure not to be a "bottleneck" on green-field or brown-field development — the key to that was "adopting better funding and financing mechanisms".
Mr Lewers said at present the only way the council could recoup the infrastructure costs was through development contributions.
"Then there’s also the argument that development contributions inhibit, or are a barrier, for development to occur.
"You can’t cut this both ways."
He was also concerned about the removal of councils’ ability to impose a rural-urban boundary line, or equivalent.
That potentially meant Arrowtown’s urban growth boundary could be removed, which would "raise a few concerns for the people of Arrowtown".
He also questioned if the market had the capacity to build the type of intensification the government wanted.
"It is very complicated.
"There are all sorts of different pressure points being placed on housing and, look, Queenstown is a different market ... and we’ve also got a pretty constrained topography as well.
"Once we see the detail I’m sure this council will be very interested in putting in a submission because, obviously, it’s a hot issue."
