Interview: Inside Wellington's local government democratic deficit

Rebecca Matthews says looking back on joining the council as a pro-housing councillor “feels like I was an innocent bunny hopping through the woods thinking nobody was against it”. Photo: House of Boom

TL;DR: Wellington City Council officials have repeatedly acted to block new housing supply, despite the express instructions of the majority of councillors in key votes last year and in the face of the desperation of young workers facing the most expensive and lowest quality rentals in Aotearoa.

I spoke to pro-housing councillor Rebecca Matthews last week about what it’s like to try to shift the centre of political gravity inside councils suffering from the sort of ‘democratic deficit’ diagnosed by the Productivity Commission in its repeated conclusions that councils block new housing supply to please older NIMBY home owners, who vote at much higher rates than young renters in council elections. I wrote about it in last Monday’s Dawn Chorus.

The Dominion Post’s Erin Gourley reported via Stuff last week that Wellington City Council staff had quietly reinserted 797 villas into the Council’s district plan, despite express instructions from Council after a heated debate and vote last year that character zones stopping building be cut by 72%.

Also yesterday, Erin reported via Stuff the number of protected residential properties would jump from 90 to 440 under the Hutt City Council’s Plan Change 56 which proposes six new heritage areas in Petone, Moera and Wainuiomata. Within the heritage precincts, owners would not be allowed to increase the footprint of their homes.

Here’s a sample of the interview:

Do these people have no shame? Don’t they see their grandkids and their grandkids’ mates who rent who are going to be living in brutally expensive, unhealthy housing?

“This has been such a weird, difficult, horrible journey to be on, because when I came on council, I just assumed having enough housing, so everybody could have somewhere to live near where they wanted to work was such a clear public good, but it feels like I was an innocent bunny hopping through the woods thinking nobody was against it.

“And when I came onto Council, I saw that this whole thing was a racket to stop housing being built, and within our organisation around the council table and the community. It just made me so mad, I couldn't believe the injustice of it. And that all of the resources, and all of the power seems to be stacked up on one side against the other. And as a councillor, who's pro housing, I'm the devil incarnate with it.

“It's just how do you upset the status quo? What do want to leave people. Would you want five storey apartments built next to the sidewalk, because then people would have homes to live on. And, the pricing of our housing would come down, and we'd be able to grow as a city, especially these areas. It's the best land, but they want to tie up forever with their old houses. And for young people who rent these older homes, they're often terrible places to live. They might be nice if you live in one and you've restored it and it's beautiful, you bought it cheap in the 80s or 90s. But that pathway is closed off to younger generations and they live in them as really crappy rentals. We don't feel that these kind of old houses represent our future in any way.” Rebecca Matthews.

For paying subscribers below, there is a lightly edited transcript of the key sections of the interview. The full audio of the interview is available for free and paying subscribers above.

‘We voted for more houses. They over-rode that’