Auckland's Agony

Auckland is grappling to cope with that population growth. Traffic jams on clogged motorways can stretch into hours. Decades of under-funding of public transport has led to a patchwork and complicated system serving a total area of around about 1000 sq kms . The rising cost of living has spawned a growing homeless population, with some forced to live in parks or sleep in their cars, and garages are now rented out as accommodation for hundreds of dollars a week.

Tāmaki Makaurau, the Māori name for Auckland which can be translated as “the place desired by many”, is living up to its billing. The city is now home to 220 ethnicities, thanks in particular to migration from Asia. About 39% of Auckland residents were born overseas, according to Penny Pirritt, director of urban growth and housing at the council, compared with a national average of 27%. It is also home to almost a quarter of New Zealand’s Māori population and 65% of the nation’s Pacific peoples.

The city’s population has swelled rapidly to 1.7 million and is estimated to be adding 40,000 people a year. By 2048 it could host nearly half of New Zealand’s current population. In the 1980s only a couple of thousand people lived in the central city. Now some 57,000 people call it home, a figure that was not expected to be reached until 2032. Some NZ$14bn of public and private development is going on in the city centre alone. Auckland council forecasts that the city could have 2.4 million people by 2048 and need a further 313,000 dwellings and up to 263,000 extra jobs. Auckland is regularly ranked as one of the best cities in the world to live in, but also one of the most expensive. Traffic congestion is a perennial complaint for commuters

Paul Spoonley, a sociology professor at Massey University, says the harbour city is simply bulging at the seams. “Infrastructure and service provision simply has not kept up with the rate of population growth, but also because there’s been a historic deficit,” he says. “We haven’t had enough houses in Auckland for decades, and there hasn’t been a major investment in adequate public transport for a very long time.” 

 Spoonley says the average cost of housing is nine times the average household income.  Over half the country’s overcrowding is in Auckland and more than 20,000 people are estimated to suffer “severe housing deprivation”. Māori and Pacific peoples are overrepresented in homelessness figures. The population squeeze and traffic congestion are part of the reason more than 30,000 Aucklanders left for other parts of the country in the four years to 2017, many of them older Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent)A survey found Auckland contained 40,000 “ghost houses”, properties empty for much of the year.

Until the 1950s, Auckland had a public transport system that was the envy of the world. Its quarter of a million citizens took more than 100 million trips a year, on ferries and buses but mainly on frequent, cheap, council-run trams to all points of the compass. But the city tore up the tram lines and laid down motorways. There is no more car capacity. Commuters complain about the cost of short bus trips and that the rail network doesn’t go to enough suburbs

It is only now, thanks to costly investment in public transport, that many are leaving their cars at home again. Billions have been spent electrifying a suburban rail system, adding bus routes and a separate busway along the northern motorway, and shifting the terminus into the city centre. A further NZ$4bn (£2bn) of taxpayer and ratepayer money is being spent on converting the terminus into a loop that will double the network’s capacity by 2024. A few divided cycleways have gone in, and a long-delayed one across the harbour bridge and on to the northern suburbs is slated for next year. Commitments have been made to new light rail lines in the next decade.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/05/bulging-at-the-seams-auckland-a-super-city-struggling-with-its-own-success

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