What did we learn?

Earlier this month I posted what I hope will be my last tiki tour of some Special Housing Areas (SHAs) near our place. And at the time I said I'd have a go at trying to put some figures on the effectiveness or otherwise of the whole SHA experiment.

I've had a look, and there's good news and bad news.

The bad news is that, using MBIE's latest Auckland Housing Accord Monitoring report (available here, with all the previous ones), I can't tell whether the SHA experiment made a difference.

There were 5,527 building consents in the SHAs over the October '13 to June '17 period covered by the report. That made up 16.4% of the total 33,639 consents issued. But whether you should think about this as 'big' or 'small' isn't obvious, because you don't know how many of these SHA approvals would have happened in any event, and were merely shifted from one box (ordinary consent) to another (SHA consent).

You can't tell whether there was any net addition from the SHA initiative. Nor can you tell (although this was one of its objectives) whether the SHA consent process sped up development. To date, 3,105 dwellings have been completed in the SHAs: the report says "The 154 Special Housing Areas are expected to eventually supply over 66,000 dwellings or sections over 20-25 years". At the risk of sounding snarky, this doesn't look like lightning progress towards that target.

I'm prepared to believe that SHAs may have facilitated some particular, large projects. As the graph below shows, more than half (56.6%) of all the SHA consents were in just 8 of the 154 SHAs (the 8 with more than 300 consents). If they were instrumental in getting the Hobsonvilles underway, excellent. But again it's hard to know whether the counterfactual is that Hobsonville would have gone ahead anyway, or faster without jumping through the SHA hoops.

If I was facing a firing squad and had to guess to save my life, I would guess that the SHAs were an intrinsically nifty idea (faster consents for helping with social objectives) but that (a) the planning streamlining may have been more apparent than real (b) the dollar give-up by developers to meet the social objective became too expensive in a roaring bull market and (c) some developers weren't going to be swayed by anything (SHAs included) until they saw how the Auckland Unitary Plan played out. Goodish plan, somewhat sidelined by events. Story of all our lives.

And the good news?

People gave a new idea a go, in an area that badly needed moving along. It was an experiment. And we need more experiments like it, in housing and across the board. Not that our oppositional political structures are well suited to running them: we haven't exactly got a system that tolerates "mistakes" or "failures", when in reality they're nothing of the kind. They're opportunities to find out what works and what doesn't.

In that light, though, if you're going to run experiments, as you should, you have to figure out beforehand, in some detail, how you'll know whether the experiment was a success or not. Sometimes it's obvious - the laboratory explodes - but often it isn't. In the case of the Auckland Housing Accord, progress towards consent targets was not an adequate metric. It needed some sort of control group comparing SHA and non-SHA volumes and speeds. My little trek around Browns Bay but writ larger, and with a budget. And it would have been useful to get inside developers' heads to see exactly what mattered most to them.