By Tony Field
The Government wants to make it cheaper to build simple smaller homes.
It has released a guide that cuts the red tape required to get resource consent, without compromising design quality.
The announcement was made on the site of a soon-to-be-built house that gained resource consent in just one day.
The design is innovative, but it uses traditional materials, like brick, timber and a tin roof – and it will cost just $168,000 to build.
“I know $168,000 sounds a lot to someone who hasn't got a lot, but believe me, relative to just your average house price in Auckland, that's very cheap,” says Housing Minister Maurice Williamson.
It was designed by Stephen Smith – the winning entry from over 100 others in the Department of Building and Housing's ‘Starter Home’ design competition.
“It can adapt itself to a variety different sun angles in terms of orientation,” says chief judge Gordon Moller.
“It could be one of a group of houses. The design lends itself to clustering together so it has a lot of different applications and it's affordable.”
Mr Williamson turned the first sod of soil on the construction of the house - but he was also at the Otara site to promote a new 202 page guide, aimed at fast tracking resource consents for developers, architects and qualified builders working on affordable mass produced housing.
“I think, if anything, we will be giving quite strong guarantees that the product that comes out the end will be a better quality and that we won't be building some of the rubbish of the past,” says Mr Williamson.
Many people can't afford an architect – but when the houses are mass produced it's a lot more financially viable for architects to get involved.
“If this was picked up by a house building company who was going to roll it out, or a government agency, who was going to roll it out, then sure you can design much better outcomes than we are currently seeing in subdivisions,” says Mr Smith.
A far more demanding resource consent process will remain in place for more complex projects or one's using less proven materials.
Housing New Zealand hopes Stephen Smith's design can be built in 18 weeks, after which it will be used as a show home, so people can see that innovative design can also be affordable.
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