Stuff ran a reader poll recently asking a simple question: would you buy a home with no parking if it meant a better location? At the time I'm writing this, the result is about as one-sided as polls get — the overwhelming majority said no, they wouldn't.
That's worth sitting with for a moment, because it's the opposite of the direction a lot of Auckland's intensification policy keeps pushing.
What we keep getting instead
Drive along Pt Chevalier Rd anywhere between 7.30 and 9.30 in the morning, or 2.30 and 6 in the evening, and be prepared to wait. Traffic-calming measures, cycleways carved into what used to be a wide road, and buses that stop mid-carriageway so everything behind has to stop with them. Work has now started on similar changes just around the corner on Carrington Rd.
And right next to that, on the old Unitec grounds, is one of Auckland's largest single housing developments — at least 4,000 homes planned across roughly 40 hectares. The plan change behind it didn't just enable that density; it deliberately reduced the car parking that would normally come with it, on the theory that making parking less convenient pushes people onto bikes, buses and their own two feet.
Auckland Transport's own submission on the project raised the obvious problem with that theory: without enough car parks, you don't get car-free residents, you get 8 to 12 kilometres of parked cars spilling onto the surrounding streets instead. The project is now tied up in the Environment Court over exactly this kind of concern.
The theory versus the reality
To be fair to the other side of this argument, the theory isn't nonsense. Reduce parking convenience enough, in a location genuinely well served by trains, buses and safe cycling routes, and some people will make the switch. Auckland has real examples of it working — a handful of inner-city apartment blocks have been built with no car parks at all, backed by bike storage and shared-car schemes, and they've found buyers.
But those examples share something in common: they're small, they're deep in the most transit-rich part of the city, and the developer knew exactly who they were building for. Roll the same idea out across 4,000 homes on the city fringe and the maths changes completely. Not every household in a development that size is a car-free household by choice — plenty simply have a car because their life requires one, and no amount of policy makes that car disappear. It just decides where that car ends up parking. And Stuff's own poll number suggests most buyers agree: given the choice, they still want the park.
What I'd do differently
From a developer's point of view, I'd always provide parking for any house or townhouse I was building — not because I don't believe density and better transport options matter, but because underestimating what your buyers or tenants actually need doesn't remove the need, it just relocates the problem onto someone else's street.
Future-proofing a project means providing the amenities people will actually use for the next twenty or thirty years, not just the amenities a planning theory says they should want today. Get that judgement wrong at the scale of a 4,000-home development, and it's not a design footnote — it's years of friction with the neighbours you're building next to, and a headache for whoever ends up managing it.
The short version
Policy can nudge behaviour. It can't repeal it. When 4,000 new households land in a part of the city that isn't yet built around getting by without a car, the cars come anyway — the only real decision being made is whether they park on your development's own land, or on the street outside somebody else's house.