Building for the future

Embracing innovation and new technology are key to building the more affordable, healthier dwellings needed to address New Zealand’s housing woes.

Thursday, June 15th 2017, 2:00PM

by Miriam Bell

The future of housing, particularly in Auckland, is shaping up to be one of the dominant issues this election year.

This week, Auckland Council entered the fray with the release of the Mayoral Taskforce on Housing report which threw down the gauntlet to central government politicians.

The report featured 33 recommendations for change – and suggested that innovation in construction practices and technologies is crucial to effectively address Auckland’s housing supply problem.

Now a panel of experts has told the Science Media Centre how innovation and industry change can help with the creation of healthy, affordable houses.

And, overall, their suggestions support those of the Taskforce on production and innovation.

University of Auckland architecture lecturer Tricia Austin said New Zealand doesn’t build houses cheaply, rather it builds large houses on large green field sites.

“In Auckland, when faced with high land costs, we go on building large stand-alone houses but on smaller and smaller plots. We concentrate on infill: adding a house onto the rear or front garden, rather than redeveloping the whole site.”

More extensive redevelopment and production of apartments and townhouses, which are more efficient users of space, is necessary, she said.

But that will require amalgamation of adjacent existing dwelling sites to get sufficiently large plots and that requires the whole area to be in one ownership.

“This type of redevelopment is most likely to take place where the land is in public ownership such as with the Housing New Zealand Corporation.”

For Victoria University’s head of architecture Morten Gjerde, it is important that the quality of housing is not compromised in the efforts to build more affordable housing.

But that is not to say that building to a lower cost is always going to lead to lower performance, she said.

“We can be smarter about the way we build to help costs come down. One way is to use industrialised processes – prefabrication.

“The operative term here is ‘the way we build’ and not what we build. In fact, prefabrication can improve the quality of the product, largely because the conditions inside the factory are much more favourable.”

Space Craft Systems Ltd director Martin Luff agreed, but said the building industry lags almost all other areas of production in terms of processes and materials.

“The way we build our homes has barely changed for over 100 years. We are still using the same guesswork and the same slow, wasteful, imprecise, labour-intensive methods.

"New, digitally-driven technologies, and the approaches that are enabled by them, definitely have a central role to play in the way we can deliver large quantities of much better quality and lower cost housing.

“The end results can reduce not just financial cost but the high social and environmental costs."

BRANZ general manager of industrial research Chris Litten is also an advocate for new technology.

He said increasing use of technology, and development of new technology, could have a significant impact on housing in New Zealand, particularly in terms of housing quality.

“We are currently developing new approaches that will assist in ensuring high-quality new-build houses are more common and good quality houses are healthier and more affordable.

"They are healthier because quality housing is well-insulated, well-heated and well-ventilated – three crucial elements in ensuring a home is a healthy place to be.

“They may well be more affordable as technology is likely to speed up building build time overall.”

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