New analysis shows that Wellington has seen the lowest number of new houses being consented on record, in the period since the new District Plan passed.
Some lobby groups pushed for a permissive District Plan, with increased height allowances and much reduced character protections, on the basis that it would bring forth a slew of new housing, which would in turn reduce prohibitive house prices.
But that has not eventuated, according to the latest data.
LIVE WELLington’s analysis was prompted by reporting in the Spinoff, that appeared to
show a dramatic uptick in building consents following the change in rules. The figures were supplied by economist Stu Donovan.
Most data experts would hesitate to take a 8 month data series and try to call it a trend.
So we compared this apparently ‘high’ month of November with other Novembers in the past to see how it stacked up.
This revealed that November 2024 was unremarkable. If you look at all the building consents issued for the month of November plotted right back to the beginning of the data series in 1990, you see that the November 2024 figure is about a third that of 2022.
Another approach is to look at what’s happened since the District Plan passed in March last year. If we compare the eight month period from April to November for each year in the entire data series you actually see that the eight months since the District Plan passed have seen the lowest number of consents issued in the history of the data series.
It's not so surprising, considering the state of the housing market. People are leaving Wellington in droves due to cuts to government jobs, and as a result there is an effective surplus of housing – leaving little incentive to build new.
Those who believed that bringing in new zoning rules was the silver bullet that would magically create new housing were sadly deceived.