Press Release
ISSUED BY AFFORDABLE AUCKLAND

Pukekohe Plan Bad News for Home Buyers

“A plan to protect rural land around Pukekohe will have dire consequences for first home buyers,” Affordable Auckland Franklin Ward candidate Niko Kloeten warns.

The 26-year-old business journalist says the Pukekohe Area Plan produced by the Franklin Local Board will do nothing to make housing more affordable for families.

The Local Board is lobbying for the plan to be included as part of the Auckland Council’s overall Unitary Plan.  It includes a rural “buffer zone” between Paerata and Drury as well as other proposed restrictions on rural development. 

Kloeten says, “The plan is more of the same flawed thinking that has led to housing becoming expensive throughout New Zealand, particularly in and around Auckland where house prices are now seven times household incomes.  Housing is considered affordable at three times incomes.”

“Strangling development around Pukekohe to ‘protect’ rural land will push up the price of land in the places where subdivision is allowed,” Kloeten says.

“This will benefit wealthy land-bankers while making housing even more expensive.  It will force young families like mine to move to Tuakau or Pokeno or even further afield to fulfil our dream of homeownership.

“This policy is also completely unnecessary.  No-one’s going to force dairy farmers and market gardeners to sell their land for housing.  Just look at the onion field next to the Cosmopolitan Club in the middle of Pukekohe.” 

Affordable Auckland would tear up the Unitary Plan and replace it with a system based on property rights.  It would also allow new towns to be built around Auckland, based on the Municipal Utility District model used in Texas.

“People are sick and tired of being told by some bureaucrat with a clipboard what they can and can’t do with their own land,” Kloeten says.

“Affordable Auckland will allow property owners to decide the best use for their property.  Not a Local Board member, not an unelected bureaucrat in an office in Auckland and certainly not some NIMBY (not in my backyard) complainer from down the road.”

Kloeten says voter feedback on the campaign trail has shown “overwhelming concern” from all ages about rising house prices in Franklin, especially in Pukekohe. 

Franklin voters are also worried about their rates increasing as a result of the council’s massive borrowing to fund expensive projects in other parts of Auckland, he says.

The council annual plan for 2013/14 shows it is borrowing almost $1.2 billion, 27% of its revenue.  Total council debt is projected to balloon to more than $12 billion by 2022, equating to almost $8000 for every man, woman and child in the Auckland region.

“Today’s debt is tomorrow’s rate hikes,” Kloeten says.  “My one-year-old daughter doesn’t get a vote at the election but she will be paying for this spending binge.”  

ENDS

Niko Kloeten
Affordable Auckland candidate, Franklin
www.affordable.org.nz
www.facebook.com/affordablecity

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