John MacDonald: Why are we building in dumb places?

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

Stop building houses in dumb places.

That’s the message the Insurance Council is giving the Government.

That bit about “dumb places” isn’t me paraphrasing, by the way. They’re not my words. They’re the exact words the Insurance Council is using after the Government confirmed that changes to the Resource Management Act are one of the 43 things in its final quarterly action plan for the rest of the year.

And when I heard that, the first dumb place I thought of was New Brighton, in Christchurch. In fact, pretty much anywhere along that eastern coastline, but especially New Brighton and South Brighton.

Because I can’t understand for the life of me why the city council has allowed building just to keep on keeping on in those areas when it knows that up to $14 billion worth of properties in Christchurch and Banks Peninsula could be at-risk from sea-level rise.

We learned about that figure in October last year when the council made a submission to parliament’s environment select committee, which is leading an inquiry into climate adaptation.

So, the Christchurch council says on one hand there are truckloads of areas that could be inundated because of sea level rise —about $14 billion worth of property— but, on the other hand, says yep, you can build that new house you want to build at Southshore. Or tells developers they can build apartments at New Brighton.

And it’s just nuts.

You’d think we would have learned not to do this years ago after the quakes.

Because remember all the head scratching that went on back in 2011 after the big earthquake about why the council had historically allowed building to happen in certain parts of town? Parts of town where things really went pear-shaped after the quakes.

But it’s coastal suburbs like New Brighton, South New Brighton and Southshore where there’s been a lot of talk about inundation because of how the coastal land dropped after the earthquakes.

It seems to have been something the Christchurch City Council has preferred to pussy-foot around over. Increasingly so, as time has gone on.

I remember speaking to Dr Bronwyn Hayward from the University of Canterbury, who has written some of the reports that have come out from the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, and I asked her if she could understand why we’re still putting houses in New Brighton and South Brighton.

She said she couldn’t understand it at all. Especially, when you consider that the council itself knows that there’s $14 billion worth of properties at risk of being inundated.

On top of that $14 billion, the council also reckons road and water infrastructure worth about $3.2 billion is at risk of being taken out because of sea level change.

But, despite that, the consents department will probably dish out approval for more building in those areas today.

I remember meeting a guy who came around to do a TradeMe pick-up a couple of years ago. He’d moved down from the North Island with his family, and they were building a new house in New Brighton. He was really excited about it and I just didn’t know what to say to him. So I said nothing.

But what I wanted to say was: “Why the hell are you doing that? Don’t you know it’s going to be underwater at some point?”

And we know it is, because the city council has told us. The same city council telling people it's ok to build there.

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