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Dunedin city planners envisage a future with fewer cars in the inner city.
Under the Dunedin City Council’s reviewed second generation district plan (2GP), residential developers across the CBD and other parts of the city are under no obligation to provide parking for tenants or apartment owners, as long as the building offers five residential units or fewer.
The more lenient parking and other building requirements were part of the rezoning of the city’s inner city and warehouse precinct area, aimed at converting warehouse and other space into mixed-use residential and commercial developments, council planning and environment committee chairman David Benson-Pope said.
Under the 2GP, developers converting or upgrading older buildings in the city centre, harbourside, the southern part of Princes St, and Smith St and York Pl zones also had the right to remove existing parking spaces in favour of ensuring a positive streetscape.
In many cases they were also provided with grants from the city’s heritage fund for things like earthquake strengthening and retaining original street facades.
Last year the fund spent about half a million dollars across 29 city heritage projects.
Under the plan’s standard residential rules, only two parks were required for buildings with between six and eight rooms, and one additional parking space for every four rooms thereafter.
Student hostels came in at one bay for every 10 residents, although that requirement fell away if the hostel was located within 500m of the University of Otago campus zone.
Rest-homes merited one space for every three beds.
Council city development manager Anna Johnson said while the city was not able to forecast car parking demand by inner city dwellers, the requirements under the plan only set a minimum level of car parking.
"[These] ... were changed based on feedback from developments that they would like more flexibility to decide what levels of car parking may be required for their developments," Dr Johnson said.
City transport strategy manager Nick Sargent said the residents’ only parking scheme in the inner city residential zone was being reviewed to support the 2GP.
He said there were currently about 10,000 publicly available car parks in the central city. "This includes restricted on-street parking, car parking buildings, in open air car parks, and parks that are not marked and are unrestricted."
The city also leased out 659 parking spaces in the city; the 10 bays at the Wall St car park were the dearest at $271.27 per month and the cheapest were the 128 bays at the Thomas Burns car park, which were leased at $101.83 each month.
Harcourts Otago chief executive Kelvin Collins said while there would be "good demand" for inner city apartments on the back of more people in the city, people would still prefer some green space and parking was important to them.
Dr Johnson said current planning had focused on bringing residents into the central city, while ensuring the maintenance, restoration and reuse of heritage buildings.
However, in its just-released DCC-commissioned report ‘‘The Housing We’d Choose’’, research agency Research First said that given any choice of area, only around 6% of Dunedin residents would opt to live in the inner city as their first choice.
The city’s inner suburbs proved the most popular among all 770 respondents at 34.9% and the outer suburbs at 32.2%.
Taking into account the reality of house prices and incomes, the outer suburbs dropped to 27.9% while inner city living became more popular, at 9.5% of respondents.
"This implies that living in a more traditional suburban setting is important to a large portion of Dunedin residents," the research report concluded.