The Government is adding to east Auckland’s housing stock by partnering with Fletcher Residential to build more than 150 new homes in Flat Bush.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) says the ministry’s Land for Housing Programme purchased 5.94 hectares of vacant land at a site in Flat Bush School Road.
The ministry has entered a development agreement with Fletcher Residential Limited to build 168 homes at the site, which it says will supply “much-needed housing into the Auckland market”.
“The housing includes a mix of stand-alone and terraced typologies, comprising KiwiBuild affordable homes and open-market homes, with 52 KiwiBuild homes for first-home buyers,” the spokesperson says.
“The first 15 KiwiBuild homes are currently available to purchase by direct sale from Fletcher Living and are priced between $529,000 and $829,000.
“Fletcher Residential has named the development ‘Ormiston Fields’.
“The first homes are expected to be complete in May 2023, with the entire development completed in April 2025.”
The Times previously reported early last year that at that time there were no homes listed for sale in east Auckland on the KiwiBuild website.
The only properties listed under “available homes” were in Mangere, south Auckland, and in Rotorua.
Eighty KiwiBuild homes were in the pipeline to be built in east Auckland at that time.
During the 2017 general election campaign, the Labour Party said its KiwiBuild policy would deliver 100,000 affordable new homes over 10 years with half of those to be located in Auckland.
KiwiBuild was launched in 2018 and has so far delivered 1623 new homes nationwide, with an additional 1063 homes under construction.
The Labour Government scrapped its target of building 100,000 affordable homes in September 2019.
The National Party has repeatedly criticised Labour for failing to deliver the number of houses it said KiwiBuild would create.
Pakuranga MP Simeon Brown last year said: “KiwiBuild is a failed Labour Party promise which has completely failed to deliver on the thousands of new homes promised to first-home buyers.”
However, Botany-based Labour List MP Naisi Chen previously defended Labour’s record on housing, pointing to the Salvation Army’s $18.6 million ‘Kaitiakitanga’ housing development in Flat Bush as an example of the Government’s progress in the sector.
The development opened in June 2021 and includes 46 units, 36 of which are two-bedroom and 10 one-bedroom.
It was delivered through a partnership between the Salvation Army and Government.
The HUD spokesperson says its Land for Housing Programme was established in 2017 to acquire private and Crown land across the country.
The programme identifies and acquires land suitable for residential development.
It then contracts to iwi and private developers who use their own capital to build homes.
Each site must be developed subject to conditions so it contributes to addressing the Government’s social objectives in relation to housing.
Those include increasing the total housing supply in constrained markets, expediting the pace of construction, and requiring a proportion of new dwellings to be built for public housing and or prices attainable for first-home buyers.
“Overall, HUD has acquired over 316ha of land for the Land for Housing Programme across the country,” the spokesperson says.
“These sites are estimated to deliver approximately 9,900 homes once fully developed, and over 1,400 homes have been completed to date. “
