By Niva Chittock of RNZ

New Zealand’s biggest city has been cited as an example of the type of residential zoning New York’s mayor wants to introduce to the United States’ biggest city.

The Democratic Party’s Zohran Mamdani became mayor in November after running a campaign centred on affordable housing and reducing the cost of living for New Yorkers.

Key policies in the 33-year-old’s campaign included rent freezes, universal childcare, a chain of city-run grocery stores focused on affordability, and free city-wide buses.

“New York City is facing one of the most severe housing crises in American history,” he said during an announcement of more housing policy on the banks of the East River in Astoria.

“The only way to overcome this crisis is by building more affordable housing – and lots of it.”

Mamdani announced his office would invest $37 billion (US$22b) over five years to build 200,000 affordable homes, preserve 200,000 more and make it easier to build housing of all kinds across New York City.

Mamdani said his office planned to do this by partnering with the private sector, direct subsidies and zoning changes.

“We know from other cities the difference that thoughtful planning, careful zoning and direct municipal financing can make,” he said.

He then cited Auckland, with Austria’s capital, Vienna, and US cities Austin, Minneapolis and Seattle as examples of what he wanted to do in New York.

“Let the lessons other cities have learned guide our future,” Mamdani said.

The Auckland Council successfully advocated for the city to be exempt from national legislation that allowed three homes up to three storeys tall to be built in most residential areas last year.

It said the Auckland Anniversary floods in 2023 “made it clear that some areas are not suitable for new homes and that Auckland needed even stronger rules to better protect people in the most vulnerable areas”.

The national legislation had also received pushback in Auckland from heritage associations concerned about further intensification in character areas that were already seeing major development.

Now, the council has made changes to the city’s Unitary Plan (under Plan Change 120), which it described as “the city’s rule book for where and how new homes and buildings can be built”.

Auckland Council said the changes would focus new homes within walking distance to the city centre, urban centres, transport stops with fast and frequent services and allow more apartment buildings along several of Auckland’s transport corridors.

These factors were shared in the housing plan Mamdani outlined for New York City.

His office had already begun zoning changes for “key corridors that already offer ready access to trains and buses”, but where “development had long been limited by restrictive zoning”.

Mamdani said he would pursue further zoning changes to develop more transit-oriented homes citywide.

Housing Minister Chris Bishop reduced Auckland building targets again in March. Photo / Mark Mitchell

“An affordable home does not mean much if you cannot get to the job that pays those bills,” he said.

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown said in a March statement that the change would give Auckland more flexibility to grow into the city it wants to be, “a global city, not embarrassingly the world’s biggest suburb”.

“It’s time to stop the talk, for Wellington to get out of the way, and let Auckland get on with building Auckland,” he said.

Mamdani also spoke about wanting to get rid of red tape in New York City to allow it to get on with building.

“[This plan] will allow us to build at the scale this crisis requires.”

“Let the largest city in the nation deliver the largest housing transformation this country has ever seen,” he said.

The Auckland Council said changes to Auckland’s Unitary Plan would also introduce tougher consenting rules in flood-risk areas to make new homes more resilient, and apply single-house zoning in the most at-risk areas, while meeting the Government’s total housing capacity requirements in the city.

Housing Minister Chris Bishop revised building targets for Auckland in March, reducing it further from the initial 2 million homes in the coming decades to 1.4 million.

Bishop said Aucklanders had been clear they wanted housing growth, “so long as it happens in the right places and where infrastructure can support it”.

However, he said, advice from officials estimated the capacity enabled by Plan Change 120 was “still likely to be around 1.6 million homes” once mandatory requirements under the National Policy Statement on Urban Development and upzoning around the City Rail Link were taken into account.

– RNZ