What’s your (suburb) height?

And we’re back, for another year, or more, and it is still raining in Wellington. News today from Auckland is that they are once again having some uncertainty about their building heights and character areas, but Wellington has apparently cleared all that up for our own city. We have sorted out that our city heights need to rise, and no-one seems to be protesting down here – or is it just that I’ve been away for a media-free month? So let’s look in a little more detail. Here’s a pic of the city e-Plan overall, with some features of note turned on.

The e-Plan has a load of information locked into it, although it sometimes takes a while to load and to refresh. Best use a powerful computer, not a tiny phone screen. Here, for instance, is a pic with some historic local (underground) streams shown, and the site of the old Te Aro Pā. It also has some pink lines and pink dotted areas shown, but I’ve forgotten what they are about.

But do you know what your building “height limits” are for the suburb you are in? I suspect that in all the confusion, all the up and down and back and forth, that people may have forgotten what the new heights will ultimately mean. For instance, if you live in Newtown then you may have heights limited to this high (below), which means that a large swathe of Newtown is now scheduled for 22m high (approx 6 storeys), and some for 14m high (4 storeys), but also the main drag down Riddiford Street has a mixture of 27m and 12m – I’m not quite sure why. Please note that from here on, the scale is all the same, but at an awkward 1:4500 (or to be precise, 1:4513), which seemed to be a good size to get whole suburbs shown:

But if you are down in Island Bay (shown below), there are some different changes, especially around the “please intensify me” shopping centre, which now reaches up to 22m, with most of the shops at only 12m, while the surrounding residential suburbs are firmly stuck on 11m (three storeys, the new normal), and some dots of 14m (clearly aiming at four storeys). While some of the local builders have already decided to build new three storey townhouses, I’m not sure that the rest of the residents quite realise yet that three storeys will soon be the norm.

Meanwhile, north of the City, centred around the Beehive and the CakeTin looks like this overall (below), where there is a small amount of Residential land saved at 22m high, while all around has 27m or the oddly specific 43.8m high. I wonder why?

And Te Aro looks more like this close up, with the former twin limits of 27m high (which was meant to be 6 storeys but developers kept pushing it to 9, 10 or 11 storeys), or 42/48m – now it seems that 42.5m is mandated everywhere. Beware Te Aro, you will never see the sun again once this goes ahead:

Just to the immediate South of that, around the Basin Reserve, we see a fraction of the side of Mt Victoria and Mt Cook, and the Waitangi Stream meandering down Rolleston Street and passing the site of another old Marae – Te Rau Karamu. At the very bottom of this picture you can make out that on either side of Adelaide Road there are two contributary streams, showing just what a poor location Adelaide Road really is for tall buildings, as the ground is all mud, not rock.

Further South we hit the Green Belt where the terrible Berhampore Golf Course crosses the Adelaide Road, although honestly it is rubbish for playing golf on. But I suspect that the owners of all the exceptionally tiny houses in B Pore will be astonished to find three storeys going up next door:

Meanwhile in Evans Bay and Kilbirnie, the 11m / 22m split continues onward, with the exciting promotion of Kilbirnie as a venue for an extensive array of 35m high buildings to replace that awful rundown shopping centre there at the present:

Just below that, we can see that Lyall Bay has got similar height treatment, although lower over by George Bolt Drive in case planes get in the way:

Over in Miramar, the Belle by the Sea, it is all fairly straightforward: its 11m all round:

We might continue this on another day, but perhaps first I should try and make a small table that has some correlation between heights in metres and heights in storeys:

As you can see, I have just based that info on a basic 3m per floor-to-floor dimension for Residential, and it can be different and would definitely be different for Commercial office buildings, but it gives you a kind of answer (although no answer for why the WCC have chosen 42.5m as their limit in Te Aro, or why 11m, 14m and 22m are their go-to residential heights). I guess it is something to do with pointy roofs?