Summary of submissions for Pillar 1 of Going for Housing Growth

Te Tūāpapa Kura Kāinga – Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and the Ministry for the Environment – Manatū Mō Te Taiao have released a summary document capturing the views on the discussion paper, Going for Housing Growth: providing for urban development in the new planning system.

The Going for Housing Growth programme is part of the Government’s broader plan to tackle Aotearoa New Zealand’s ongoing housing shortage. It’s structured around three pillars that make system changes to address the underlying causes of the housing supply shortage. Pillar 1 seeks to free up land for urban development and remove unnecessary planning barriers. 

Between June and August 2025, we worked with the Ministry for the Environment – Manatū Mō Te Taiao to ask the public about their views on how previous Cabinet decisions on Going for Housing Growth Pillar 1 could be incorporated into the new resource management system. 

The high-level decisions taken by Cabinet in 2024 included: 

• Introducing new housing growth targets for Tier 1 and 2 councils, requiring them to enable 30 years of feasible housing capacity in district plans 
• Strengthening intensification requirements for Tier 1 councils  
• Providing for a greater mix of uses (such as allowing dairies and cafes close to where people live) across urban environments 
•  Removing rural-urban boundary lines from planning documents 
• Investigating options to require councils to spatially plan for 50 years of growth (up from 50) and be more responsive to private plan changes, and 
• Prohibiting councils from setting minimum floor area or balcony requirements.

The discussion document received a total of 227 submissions from a range of people and groups including individuals and business, local government, developers, hapū, iwi, Māori and community and industry groups.