Both government and some local politicians refuse to let most city Kiwis have their desired dream of house and garden and a bit of separation from the neighbours.
They are making us pay for their historic mismanagement of land and house availability thinking the market will provide.
We have experienced politically-driven severe inflation of land and houses. Politicians’ historic deregulation of the building industry created massive problems of leaking, unsafe houses, apartments and schools etc while ignoring the advice of responsible builders and building inspectors in the past.
We have had and are having to bear a lot of cost and worry because of these stupid politicians. Now they want to take away our quality of life and create ghettos where the slaves of commerce sleep at night.
Politicians are ignoring the global warming of our climate and sea level rise where our standard of living will deteriorate further.
We need backyards of lawn, trees, garden and vegetable patch to keep our ground and local environment cooler and sequester carbon and improve our health and well-being. We don’t need more concrete, tar seal, high density tall buildings, increased roof and wall areas sucking up the heat with lack of vegetation. This will only increase the temperature of our local environment. Fewer homes means less traffic congestion, parking problems and less air pollution which can be reduced by trees and vegetation. The science has been done on these matters. The existence of wildlife in our cities is part of our well-being.
In the future, the sea level rising will do enormous damage to our coastal areas. Climate change is bringing violent storms and more rain more often. We need to retain any excess capacity in our storm water systems to cope with this change. Auckland Council would do well to concentrate on these problems and plan to meet these challenges and convince the government to repeal their housing density legislation.
The sea level rising will submerge coastal cities and towns because man will not reduce its CO2 emissions in time or reduce its populations where necessary. As CO2 is removed from the atmosphere, it will be replaced by the enormous store of CO2 in the oceans occupying 72 per cent of the earth’s surface.
Paul Jensen, Howick
