Changing times are compelling Tauranga City Council to have another attempt at re-writing inner city development rules under the aegis of a Compact City Project, approved by the Strategy and Policy committee last week.

The council is spurred on by a proposed National Policy Statement requiring councils to assess future growth projections and to respond by identifying and enabling development capacity able to meet that growth.

The city council is having another go at encouraging city living.

It also requires councils to provide a 'future land release and intensification strategy' to sit alongside the relevant district/city plans.

The compact city project will contain a number of strands of work that together will provide a clear way forward to deliver intensification across Tauranga's existing urban area, say city planners.

Four strands of work are proposed.

• City Centre - focusing on activating residential growth in the CBD predominantly through non-regulatory levers, such as investment in public facilities, improved amenity, more events, strategic land opportunities, exemplar developments, etc.

• City Living - refine the planning framework to make good quality residential development easier and more feasible.

• Suburban - revisit the planning framework to determine whether additional growth can be enabled in some suburban areas.

• Other Projects - undertake a range of specific growth related projects such as; Smiths Farm and a Centres Strategy.

'Advancing intensification is a difficult task,” says city planning manager Michael Tucker.

'That's why this project seeks to do it in a series of steps. The first two strands of work recognise the existing policy on intensification is already in place in the operative Tauranga City Plan, as well as supporting infrastructure. Accordingly, these strands of work focus on better enabling this growth to be delivered.”

Feedback from developer's agents and advisors before embarking on the Compact City identified key issues, including a move away from the ‘two pages of controls' as in the current Controlled Activity status.

Issues also include a lack of clear leadership and poor communication to sell the benefits of Infill and intensification, with accusation that ‘Councillors are a problem; they don't understand the proposition' and ‘There is no leadership, there just isn't any leadership', or ‘An unbelievably adversary culture', and including, ‘Councillors are prehistoric,' ‘It's too uncertain', and also ‘Systemic bias against change despite rhetoric of Intensification'.

The feedback also accuses the council of poorly explaining the Arataki and Greerton intensification proposals, and now developers are wearing the backlash.

"If you want Intensification to occur you need to recognise this is the hardest part of the housing market to operate in for developers and you need to plan and organise accordingly"

They also point to serious flaws in the existing regulatory environment which don't encourage infill or intensification projects in city or suburban areas.

There is also a common theme in the feedback that the Tauranga CBD lacks a competitive edge over The Mount.

Most people that could or would live in the City Living Zone are more likely to live in The Mount because of the quality of the amenity already in place there.

Unless there is significant improvement in the amenity and vitality of the Tauranga city centre the view expressed is that there are other and better development opportunities to pursue, particularly when taken in the round with the difficulty of putting together a development scheme that is both viable and Resource Development Act compliant.