Going for Housing Growth
The Government is proposing councils free up more capacity for housing as part of its Going for Housing Growth plan.
Going for Housing Growth has three pillars that address the underlying causes of the housing shortage. These are
- Pillar One: freeing up land for urban development, including removing some planning barriers
- Pillar Two: improving infrastructure funding and financing to support urban growth
- Pillar Three: providing incentives for communities and councils to support growth.
The new proposals relate to Pillar One.
The proposals are:
- New Housing Growth Targets
- Councils in our key urban (Tier 1) and provincial (Tier 2) centres will need to allow 30 years of housing growth in their district plans.
- Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS) optional for councils.
- The MDRS allows three houses of up to three storeys per site without resource consent. They will become optional for councils, once they show how they will meet their Housing Growth Target.
- Making it easier to build both inside and at the edges of New Zealand’s cities.
- Strengthening existing requirements for housing intensification.
- Urban councils will have to intensify housing along ‘strategic transport corridors’. They will also have to offset any reductions in development capacity due to reasons such as ‘special character’ by providing more capacity in another area.
- Rural-urban boundary lines in council plans will be banned to make it easier for new housing to be built on ‘greenfields’ land (land that’s never been built on or developed before). Councils can still have rural zoning, but they will not be able to set hard regulatory lines that constrain growth.
The Government sought feedback on how the proposals in the first pillar of the Going for Housing Growth programme could fit into the new resource management system.
Pillar 1 aims to free up land for development and remove unnecessary planning barriers.
This package is a joint consultation run by the Ministry for Housing and Urban Development and the Ministry for the Environment.
Consultation on package 4 ran from Wednesday 18 June - Sunday 17 August 2025
View the Going for Housing Growth consultation.
Read the summary of submissions received on this consultation.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and the Ministry for the Environment are supporting this work programme.
Read more about the new proposals and the wider Going for Housing Growth programme [HUD]