Residential building coverage

We are thinking about increasing the building coverage (amount of space a building can cover on a site) within the residential areas of the district. This will cover most, but not all, residential areas. Read on to find out more.

What is building coverage?

Building coverage sets the maximum amount of land that buildings can cover on a residential property. Our District Plan currently limits building coverage to 30% of the total property size. This means that if your property is 100m², buildings can cover 30m² of your land.

We need to limit the size of buildings because there needs to be a balance between interests of the property owner and their neighbours. For example, very large buildings can cause issues by reducing the amount of light nearby houses will receive. There also needs to be some non-building space on a property so that things like driveways and outdoor areas are included. This makes sure that there is good access to homes and outdoor spaces for people to enjoy.

What is the issue?

In 2021 there was a total of 123 consents that asked for approval for non-compliant buildings, of these 59 asked to go over the 30% maximum building coverage.

Most of these applications were looking to cover between 31% and 36% of their site, but because they didn’t comply with the 30% rule in our District Plan, they had to ask us for permission.

Non-compliant resource consents have an additional cost in both time and money for processing as they are outside the currently allowed coverage limit. The current 30% maximum coverage not only makes the process more costly, but it also makes it difficult for people to provide suitable accommodation for their families. This is important as people are living together in larger groups due in part to the high cost of housing.

What are other districts doing to address this issue?

The building coverage requirements of Queenstown, Horowhenua, Whakatane and Matamata-Piako district plans have been compared to Taupō’s district plan due to their comparable population sizes.

These districts have a maximum residential coverage of between 35% and 40%.

What we are proposing to change

We want to increase the maximum building coverage in residential areas to 35%.

This will reduce the amount of money and time spent on compliance and allow landowners to have easier access to the extra building space they have been asking for. A 5% increase will balance the demand for extra space without drastically altering building coverage, minimising any negative impacts of increasing building size.

The example below illustrates how this extra maximum coverage could provide the space to have an additional bedroom or a garage on a 600m² property.

What about the rest of the residential chapter of the district plan?

We are currently working on a much bigger review of the Residential Chapter. This will take a bit longer, so we are suggesting we fast track the coverage change so that it can happen sooner. We may look at a greater coverage limit in the full change, but for now we think the increase of 5% will cut out the need for most houses to get a resource consent for coverage.

Changing the building coverage separately to the wider Residential Plan Change will allow these benefits to occur faster. It will possibly take up to two years until the full Residential Environment section review is completed.

Consultation

Consultation on the first bundle of plan changes closed on Monday 13 June 2022.

Thank you for all of the feedback received.