Hawke’s Bay highlights the new urban sprawl agenda

Here’s what National’s new urban sprawl agenda means in the Hawke’s Bay…

Hawke’s Bay housing to be built over ‘the best soils in the world’

• The ‘Future Development Strategy’ (FDS) replaces the now expired Heretaunga Plains Urban Development Strategy which ceased to exist in 2020.

A plan for future housing in Hawke’s Bay has sparked controversy over its proposal to use productive food growing land and low lying flood risk areas.

The Heretaunga Plains spread over 300 square kilometres, from the hill’s of Hawke’s Bay out to the coastline, and much of the area is a patchwork of crops and farms covering the fertile food producing soils which have formed over millions of years.

Richard Gaddum formed the ‘Save the Plains Group’ five years ago to try and protect the soils and prevent the urban sprawl from Hastings and Napier eating up the precious and productive land.

“They are very special because we’ve got the best soils in the world, I believe, for growing food… and we’ve got the best climate,” he said.

…great, destroying some of the best growing land we have in the country while forcing poor people to live in flood zones.

We should be focused on higher urban density, but that demands regulation and urban planning which National decry as ‘red tape’.

So instead it’s the urban sprawl plan which destroys fertile farm land WHILE dooming the poor to flood zones.

Urban planning takes time and money and because this Right Wing Government hates taxing their rich mates, we don’t have the resource for that so instead it’s the Wild West of cheap property speculation fuelled by mass immigration that is drying up because so many Kiwis are fleeing NZ.

This is a short sighted bigoted Government who slavishly enforce their donors interests at the cost of the common good.

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