I interviewed Aksel Bech in this latest podcast episode. We are tackling housing unaffordability and the levers within legislation, policy, and at the local government level that are available to be able to create better outcomes for housing.

I reached out to Aksel because he and I care deeply about addressing this housing unaffordability problem in Aotearoa NZ and he is leading the way on housing reform in his local area through The Housing Czar, a housing advocacy initiative in the Waikato. (http://housingczar.nz/)

We mainly talk about:

·      The Waikato Housing Initiative (WHI), which is a collaboration of all the different councils within that Waikato region as well as the broader housing ecosystem of social to market housing, where they came together to create a local strategy around how to tackle the regional housing crisis. (https://www.waikatohousinginitiative.org/)

·      Inclusionary Zoning/Housing:  A policy that a local government can put into place to make land available for affordable housing.  Recently the Waipa District Council approved to include IZ into their Resource Management Plan.  We explore why they did this and the benefits it will bring to that District.

·      The Community Land Trust (CLT) as a means of creating housing to be perpetually affordable. We touch on how this model works particularly well when paired with IZ.

·      Collective and community-focused housing.  We discuss the importance of common and shared spaces between the houses to create a sense of neighbourly cohesion and belonging.

Below are the highlights taken from the interview with Aksel

Council need to act on their power to bring about more affordable housing in their area:

And what it takes is for councils to say, "Oh, is our job. We can be enabling. We can choose to do this. We don't need the central government to change the law. We actually have the power already to set regulation and this is still within the parameters of what we can choose to do.”

So really looking at councils to do the things that they can do because they've got their hands on more levers than anybody. In the land and the policy and regulation area, they really control a lot of the levers there. And it doesn't need legislative change for them to adopt a different approach.

Part of the things we're asking you to do on behalf of your community includes well beings and housing is at the core of so many wellbeing outcomes for families.

The Waikato Housing Initiative is about councils needing to do things differently to take a collaborative and systemic approach to better housing outcomes

About seven years ago, through the Mayoral forum, here in the Waikato, 11 different mayors 11 councils all [came] together. They basically made the call, the government's not gonna come.  There's no white horse coming over the horizon here to save us. We're going to have to step up here. We're going to have to lead,  or things are just going to continue to get worse. They formed a Regional Housing Initiative to say, “well, what are the things we can do? What are the levers we can control that will start to make systemic changes? So not individual one project or one development, but systemic changes and introduce new models that will actually produce different outcomes?”

The big focus initially was councils because they control a lot of the levers, but it is a whole of continuum thing. You can't just tweak one bit, you have to have the whole of the continuum in mind.  And specifically we are looking at affordable housing.

Inclusionary Zoning is a policy which has incentives to prioritise affordable housing

So the whole point of inclusionary zoning is that actually only the council, only the community can change the zoning. The community via the council changes the zoning. That's a gift only the community itself can give. When we've got a housing crisis, maybe a little bit of that gift, 10-20% of that gift, that uplift,  needs to stay with the community.  That's kind of the philosophical way to  put it.  Where there's growth, it's a really powerful lever.

So whether that's money that's yielded, reflecting the uplift, or whether it's actual titles of sections within that development, that's then passed back to council for council either to do something with directly or perhaps to put into a Lands Trust which might itself do something or might partner with [an organisation] like Habitat for Humanity, Wise group, Bernardos or the Salvation [Army]. Or it could be an ecovillage.

The point is that that land would remain in community ownership in perpetuity. It's not winning the lottery for the first people who buy it, who sell it at market price thereafter. The land itself and possibly the dwelling, depending on the model would remain in the ownership of the Lands Trust, ensuring perpetual affordability.

[Councils] have got the opportunity with development still coming on stream to say, “This is when we need to introduce that new tool. We need to be brave. We need to stand up on behalf of  our community, which is increasingly distressed by unavailability of rentals, unaffordability of rentals, and the inability to purchase.  We need to intervene before we get as bad as Queenstown.”

Inclusionary zoning “carrots” that council can offer developers

For more detailed information and explanation videos on Inclusionary Zoning, AKA Inclusionary Housing, you can visit this site: https://inclusionaryhousing.org/inclusionary-housing-explained/what-is-inclusionary-housing/

About Common Ground

It is the consulting agency I started to provide professional services that enable more affordable, socially connected, resilient, and climate-adaptive housing and neighbourhood development and place-based living.

We work with local government, community housing providers,  for-purpose developers, and groups of people wishing to lead their own housing initiatives.

We provide services in housing strategy, in design and facilitation of meaningful community engagement, in research, in policy development, in training in new approaches to better housing outcomes,

We also provide services in Workplace Culture and Communication to create more cohesive and effective teams and workplaces.

Why work with Common Ground:

• We take a whole systems and innovative approach

• we have decades of experience in community and regenerative development,

• we have a compassionate work culture,

• we are aligned with the community engagement best practices of IAP2,

• our knowledge is research-based, and

• we work with a spirit of joy, creativity, and collaboration.

Visit our website at https://www.commonground.net.nz/ to learn more about our services, get the two reports—one on housing for women and another on the community land trust model.

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Get in touch with Zola directly at zola@commonground.net.nz