It was difficult not to be underwhelmed after reading the government and Auckland Council’s Housing Accord released a couple of weeks ago. It was a manual of what has failed in almost every housing market in the world and showed one common problem: everyone agrees to build more houses and sets an arbitrary target without following through.

The problem with targets is that they are often mistaken for action and if the target is not reached, momentum for change can be lost.

However, subsequent budget day announcements improved on the original accord.

The Housing Accord is a deal between the Beehive and Queen Street to cooperate on building 39,000 houses in Auckland over the next three years to ease the shortage of housing available for purchase.

The accord will create ‘special housing areas’ that will operate for the next three years while the Resource Management Act reform process and the Auckland unitary plan are finalised. The unitary plan provides for 400,000 houses over the next 30 years, and the accord aims to get about 10% of this number built in 10% of the time.

Simple enough, but it is a hugely ambitious objective. To reach 400,000 houses, the average build rate needs to be 13,300 new houses per year over the next 30 years. The targets for the next three years are 9,000, 13,000, and 17,000, respectively. The current rate is about 3,600, while the average for the past 20 years has only been 7,400 houses per year.

Put simply, we need to nearly double the current rate of building, but this plan is only for three years.

However, the accord aims to reduce the time taken to get consents from three years to six months for greenfields and to three months for brownfields.

Another positive sign is the announcement that the central government will intervene if the Auckland Council doesn’t fix its consenting regime. The potential for centralisation is not positive, but the creation of some (limited) competition between potential consent providers is.

It also overrides all existing plans from previous councils, including zones, the metropolitan urban limit, and so on, until the unitary plan becomes active.

It is a good start, and the identified shortage of housing as a driver of price by both levels of government is positive – but beware of targets.