Council+policy

Papakainga is cool. But what about the rest of us? How about a policy for building sustainable rural communities with very high bars which can be built on ANY rural land. I.e. requirements for HIGH DENSITY clustered housing with its own water and energy supply, waste water treatment, composting toilets, recycling facilities, storm water management, historical survey, consultation with local hapu, emergency management plan, at least 100m buffer zone around it and maximum distance from a sealed road. Each community should be a minimum 15 houses and maximum 30 houses (from cohousing experience) to ensure that there are sufficient people resources to manage the community while staying small enough to enable cooperative management. Legally the remaining land (once you have subdivided off the piece for sections) is community owned (like a unit trust) and can be run as a business or it could be returned to native vegetation. __This supports sustainable land management __ as communities are more likely to take a long term view and to feel a connection to the land; the presence of more communities in rural areas provide a boost of valuable services and labour and, well, community; investment in land that is economically marginal is enabled as communities will want to improve their environment.

Now I know you are going to say "Who would want to live like that?". Google cohousing. These types of development are very popular and successful at building community. In rural areas, individual buildings can be designed to give private views out over the fields, compensating for the proximity of neighbours. Lifestyle properties are very popular, but wasteful and often a trap - this offers rural living without the isolation and with shared workload. With this proposal, it would not be necessary to go through rezoning hoops, saving a lot of money and avoiding competition with commercial subdividers so making the sections very affordable at rural land rates.

Reading the housing theme paper, the overriding sense of council's need to control housing provision is patronising - tell us what standard to work towards and leave it to us to work out our solutions. Yes your engineers will need to become familiar with composting toilets and wetland treatment.... but that is their job, not telling us we have to waste water flushing valuable nutrients out to sea.

Self-providing, self-reliant communities are resilient to change - economic, climatic and social change. I disagree with the implication of the housing theme paper that the majority of people should be/will be/wants to be urban in the future. Communication technology and improved roading means that is possible to work from almost anywhere in Hawkes Bay. I believe we should promote a reversal of the urban drift to support rural communities and provide an opportunity for those who want to live in wide open spaces to do so.