Government Planning Impedes Christchurch Recovery

It’s been more than three years since much of Christchurch, New Zealand, was devastated by an earthquake, and recovery is far from complete. Now, a new report from the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development blames the government for hampering the recovery.


Government meddling has not only hampered recovery, it made the effects of the earthquake worse. The owner of the building that collapsed onto this bus, killing all but one of the occupants, had wanted to demolish it before the earthquake, but the city held it up because it was considered a historic structure.

This is a familiar tale: after a natural disaster, instead of letting people rebuild, government planners attempt to impose their ideals of what the city should look like on the supposedly blank landscape. The same thing happened in New Orleans: people from New Urban architect Andrés Duany to the free-market Mercatus Center agree that government planners have impeded recovery of that city after Hurricane Katrina.

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As detailed by Christchurch resident and retired commercial developer Hugh Pavletich, the problem there is that planners have decided to rebuild Christchurch to meet their New Urban goals of density and mixed-use developments. When combined with crony capitalism–in which a few politically connected developers are favored over others–severely hampers reconstruction.

Christchurch’s failure was actually predicted just a few months after the earthquake by developer Bob Jones, who argued that government regulation and lack of demand for density meant that the devastated downtown area could not be rebuilt to the high densities planners wanted. Instead, he urged the city to “focus on being a garden city,” that is, a low-density city offering people housing that they want and affordable costs.

Instead of attempting to create utopias on earth, city officials after an earthquake or other disaster should throw out the rule books and let people develop what they want and can afford. This doesn’t mean that they should allow construction of unsafe buildings, but it does mean that, since low-density buildings tend to be safer per dollar spent, people should be allowed to build what they can afford, not what planners want.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

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