Alongside its proud heritage identity, Dunedin’s reputation risks being overshadowed by a growing association with contamination concerns.
Across the city, ordinary residential properties are increasingly being swept into contaminated land rules. Not because of industrial activity, chemical storage or hazardous industry — but because of something far more mundane, the routine maintenance or slow weathering of exterior lead-based paint from houses built before 1945.
This is not how the legislation was intended to work.
Central to the issue is how Dunedin City Council has incorporated, and applies a unique step actively exploring the entire history of a site as part of assessing consent applications.
This invariably finds a history of using lead-based paint, then prompting consideration of the national framework for contaminated land management to ordinary residential properties — specifically through its use of the Hazardous Activities and Industries List (Hail).
In Dunedin, the assumed presence of historic lead paint is enough to classify a property as having undertaken a ‘‘hazardous activity.’’
This classification is critical, because once a property is tagged as Hail it automatically triggers the National Environmental Standard for Assessing and Managing Contaminants in Soil (NESCS).
And this is where the real problem begins.
The NESCS was designed to manage genuine contaminated land — sites affected by industrial processes, chemical use or deliberate hazardous activities.
It was never intended to capture standard suburban sections where the only ‘‘contamination’’ arises from decades-old house paint weathering into surrounding soil.
Yet in Dunedin, that is exactly what is happening.
This is not simply a matter of interpretation. Evidence from across the country shows Dunedin is an outlier. Other councils operating under the same legislation do not routinely classify residential properties as Hail sites on the basis of historic paint alone.
Without that initial classification, the NESCS is not triggered — and the consequential cascade of compliance costs is averted.
The DCC has chosen an approach to managing lead as a contaminant that is not proportionate and consistent with national practice. In Dunedin, the gateway is being opened far wider than the NESCS intended.
The consequences are significant. Once a site is identified as Hail, property owners can be required to commission detailed contamination investigations, engage specialist consultants and obtain resource consents from both the DCC and the Otago Regional Council (ORC). These steps are not optional — they are regulatory requirements.
Industry estimates suggest these processes add between $20,000 and $35,000 to the cost of building a single home. For larger developments, costs can escalate into the hundreds of thousands.
These are not upgrades. They do not improve the quality of housing. They are purely compliance costs — and they are ultimately passed on to buyers and renters of new homes.
The scale of the issue is hard to ignore. Based on census data 24,500 homes were built in Dunedin before 1945 — the proxy used for likely lead-based paint presence.
While only a small fraction of sites are redeveloped each year, DCC’s policy approach effectively places a large portion of the city’s residential land under the shadow of potential contamination.
Yet if this were truly a serious and widespread public health issue, the response would look very different. There would be public health campaigns, targeted interventions and proactive remediation of high-use areas such as council’s own parks, sportsfields and playgrounds. As developer Lyndon Fairbairn asked in this paper last year ‘‘If the council truly believes this is a serious public health risk, then why aren’t they treating it like one?’’.
Instead, the issue surfaces primarily when someone tries to build.
That inconsistency raises an obvious question: is this really about managing risk — or managing process?
Lead in urban soils is not unique to Dunedin. It is a legacy issue found in cities across New Zealand and internationally. There is no practical way to eliminate it entirely, and risk is typically managed through common-sense measures — not by broadly classifying entire properties as potentially contaminated land.
Since 2023, between 117 and 121 residential properties within the Dunedin boundary have been recorded in the ORC’s Contaminated Sites Register; added due to residual lead in soil identified through DCC’s unique process. Once recorded, that status remains attached to the property and is disclosed through LIM reports, negatively impacting property values and market confidence.
Over time, the cumulative cost to the city could be enormous. Estimates suggest remediation linked to redevelopment could approach $500m. That cost does not sit with council — it sits with homeowners, developers and ultimately the community.
This is not an argument against environmental protection. Nor is it a dismissal of lead as a contaminant. It is an argument about getting the starting point right and applying national regulation in a consistent way as almost all other councils do.
Dunedin has a choice. It can continue down a path that treats ordinary homes as potentially contaminated sites, or it can align with national practice and apply the rules as they were intended.
That starts with a simple step: stop classifying standard residential properties as Hail sites where no genuine hazardous activity has occurred.
Until then, the city may soon be known less for its heritage, and more for its land contamination.
- Darryl Sycamore is the planning manager for Terramark Ltd, a local land engineering, survey and planning consultancy.
