An 81-apartment development in Auckland was successfully halted by residents concerned about the impact it may have had on their community, but questions still remain on how to address Aotearoa's growing population and ballooning price tags on houses.
Residents of Beach Haven on the North Shore fought back the development over concerns of an influx in crime and younger people, as well as a setting of precedents for apartment complexes in largely suburban communities.
Developers wanted to build 81 apartments on the 7147sq m site, with four three-storey blocks.
Beach Haven resident Crispin Robertson helped rally his community against the planned complex, telling Breakfast people had bought homes in the area based on Auckland Council's Unitary Plan, the land for the planned apartments being suitable for "nine or 10 houses".
"It's a piece of land surrounded by houses [and] first-home buyers ... there's people on that land who'd literally just bought a house based on that plan.
"We all bought everything in good faith, and then the developer comes in and puts something in there that Auckland Council had never planned for.
"If you'd seen the stress that it put people through, it ruined everyones' Christmases."
Robertson noted the significance of housing intensification, but said the unitary plan catered for it "in the right places".
"Where we live, this place is surrounded by single-storey dwellings predominantly on all sides ... we've already got intensification in our suburbs, but they're on main roads, not where you've got predominantly low-rise housing."
Beach Haven residents are taking a victory lap, however with a growing population and greater need for affordable housing, a solution that leaves suburbia untouched is becoming tougher to come by.
Professor Robyn Phipps, Dean of the Wellington Faculty of Architecture and Design Innovation at Victoria University, also joined the programme this morning and said people need to take a "big step back and look at this from a bigger picture".
"The world is in a situation where the population is growing remarkably quickly ... it's doubling every 15 years at this point in time.
"We cannot as a society just afford to sprawl. We have to densify because every time we sprawl out into green space, that means that we're cutting down trees ... [and] the sponge city or urban land where water is going to be absorbed, and that's going to lead to much bigger problems for a lot more people."
Phipps added that, in the face of councils "getting it wrong" by cutting down on green spaces and building shoebox apartments, there are architects that do get it right from the start.
"There are ways where we can think about how do we actually build not just terraced housing, but nice, medium density [homes] where outdoor space, recreation space, shared spaces are all well built-in right from the beginning."
Bentley Studios director Leon Da-Silva, who was behind the proposal, said the company was "licking its wounds".
“It’s been three years trying to get consent to build affordable houses in a nice suburb, but the residents living in $2 million houses only want more of the same," he told Stuff.
It was yet to decide if it would appeal.
"We could accept the decision if we felt that we had been given a fair crack, but the commissioners seem to have listened to residents over the expert opinions of the professionals."
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