Future Development Strategy

We’ve come together with Horizons Regional Council to lay out the blueprint for housing and business growth across the city for the next 30 years.

With more people choosing to live and work in Palmy, our population is growing fast. This means we need to carefully plan how we can provide more space for new homes and businesses, while protecting our environment and other things that make this a great place to live. 

Our Future Development Strategy guides how we zone and provide infrastructure for housing and business growth

The strategy sets out: 

  • what a well-functioning urban environment means for Palmy
  • iwi and hapū aspirations for urban development
  • opportunities and constraints to growth
  • our growth needs and where we’re proposing growth should occur 
  • growth-related infrastructure needs. 

The strategy informs where we will prioritise land rezoning to support housing and business needs. It also informs how we will unlock land for development through our Infrastructure Strategy and Long-Term Plan.

The strategy was adopted in June 2024, and will next be reviewed in 2027.

Future Development Strategy(PDF, 18MB)

We’ll be keeping track of how we implement the strategy each year with our implementation plan. The implementation plan is useful for those looking to buy or develop land in the city’s growth areas and keeps track of growth infrastructure that needs to be built before development. See below for our latest implementation plan.

Future Development Strategy Implementation Plan(PDF, 1MB)

To grow sustainably, we're taking a balanced approach

To meet the city’s needs for different types of households and businesses, we’ll need to use a balance of growing the city upwards, repurposing some parts of the city for new uses, and expanding the edge of our urban areas.

See here for our future growth areas over the next 30 years (2024-54). 

Next steps

We’ll be updating our Housing and Business Needs Assessment in 2025. This comes around every three years and is used to inform our future development strategy. Our next review of this strategy will be in 2027 to keep pace with any changes in government direction, and to update our strategy with new information from the projects listed below. 

Those projects include:

  • Rezoning investigations for medium density housing, housing in Roxburgh Crescent, 17 Summerhays Street, Huia Street Reserve and Kākātangiata, and industrial land at Te Utanganui.
  • Possible private plan changes at 160 Napier Road and the Bunnythorpe Business Park.
  • Reviews of our Citywide Vegetation Framework, mapping of highly productive land, and new flood catchment modelling.
  • The development of a citywide stormwater strategy.
  • Business cases for strategic transport projects such as PNITI and the Urban Cycle Network Masterplan. 

Contact us about this strategy

Strategic planning team

Phone: 06 356 8199

Email: planchange@pncc.govt.nz

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