Sent: Tuesday, 21 January 2025 4:35 pm
Subject: Information request - housing needs and developments in the Rotorua district
I refer to your information request of 5 January 2025 regarding housing needs and developments in the Rotorua district. Your request has been processed under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act.
You requested:
- Data on local housing demand, including any assessments of homelessness or housing shortages in the area.
- Updates on regional housing development plans and initiatives aimed at addressing housing affordability.
- Insights into local partnerships or programs to address housing challenges.
Council does not hold any information on homelessness, however there is various information on Rotorua’s housing demand and affordability in the Rotorua Housing and Business Development Capacity Assessment (2021) (HBA) on Council’s website at the following link:
Rotorua Housing and Business Development Capacity Assessment 2021- Main Report (PDF, 7.6MB)
- Housing demand – Section 2
- Housing affordability – Section 4
- Sufficiency of Capacity (Shortfall) – Section 14
The technical report is at the link below:
Rotorua Housing and Business Development Capacity Assessment 2021- Technical Report (PDF, 8.2MB)
In relation to the shortfall:
Rotorua Lakes Council’s HBA, undertaken by Market Economics, identified that there was the following housing shortfall:
- 1890 dwellings in the short term (including unmet demand of 1500 dwellings).
- 1400 dwellings in the medium term (including the unmet demand of 1500 dwellings).
- 3630 dwellings in the long term The HBA and supporting technical report are both available on the Council’s website.
The National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD) 2020 stipulates that if the insufficiency is wholly or partly a result of RMA planning documents, the council must change those documents to increase development capacity for housing as soon as practicable and consider other options for increasing development capacity and other enabling development.
In terms of demand:
Clause 3.6(1) of the NPS-UD requires that “the amount of development capacity that is sufficient to meet expected housing demand plus the appropriate competitiveness margin” in the short-medium and in the long term is clearly stated in each district of a tier 2 urban environment.
The Housing Bottom Line is to be based on the amount of “feasible, reasonably expected to be realised development capacity that must be enabled to meet demand, along with the competitiveness margin”.
The following are the calculated Housing Bottom Lines for the Rotorua urban environment for the short, medium and long term.
Sufficient zoned and infrastructure[1]served, feasible development capacity is required to meet demand to accommodate the following number of projected additional dwellings in each time period:
- Short Term (3 years, 2020-2023): an additional 3,560 dwellings.
- Medium Term (10 years, 2020-2030): an additional 6,240 dwellings.
- Long Term (30 years, 2020-2050): an additional 9,740 dwellings.
In terms of programs to address housing challenges:
A report ‘Approach to development of new housing plan’ was considered and endorsed by Council at the Council meeting on 11 December 2024 (Agenda of Council Meeting - Wednesday, 11 December 2024 (PDF, 53.5MB)). This report provides a lot of insight information and lists Council’s key priorities and areas of focus for a draft Housing Plan, leveraging the potential opportunity as a government housing priority area.
Following endorsement by elected members, staff will continue to work on the final Housing Plan during 2025.
