By Gareth Vaughan
In a rare show of bipartisan cooperation, the Labour and National parties teamed-up to enact new housing intensification laws in late 2021.
This came through the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Act. Pushed through a rushed select committee process to the protestations of the ACT and Green parties, it will allow the building of up to three homes of up to three storeys on most sites in Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Wellington and Christchurch without the need for a resource consent.
Councils in the five cities are now moving to adopt medium density residential standards (MDRS).
But what does all this really mean, where's the process at, and is this actually the right way to tackle New Zealand's housing crisis?
To discuss all this we spoke with Doug Fairgray, director at consulting and economic research firm Market Economics, in a new episode of the Of Interest podcast.
"One of the effects [of the changes] will be that the distribution of new housing supply is likely to become spread more widely across cities rather than focused around centres and transit stations as is intended under the National Policy Statement [on Urban Development]," Fairgray says.
"There has been a strong narrative, [over] the last decade at least, that planning is to blame for high housing prices. And that has led to a focus that therefore planning legislation should solve the problem. There's quite a debate about that because house prices have been driven above all by consumer sentiment and interest rates," adds Fairgray, who is also secretary of the Association for Resource Management Practitioners.
You can find all episodes of the Of Interest podcast here.
94 Comments
From the brief write up this sounds like 'whataboutism' - hopefully a full listen will reveal a more balanced discussion (i will listen later in the morning). Whataboutism is a classic diversionary tactic used to confuse and delay consensus decision making.
Of course demand factors like the availability of cheap credit and consumer sentiment affects house and land prices. But so do supply factors like planning permission and infrastructure provision. And in the long term supply factors can be fixed by governments wheras interest rates and consumer sentiments are largely outside their control. Criticizing governments for focusing their attention on factors they can control seems silly
supply factors can be fixed by governments
What about the demand pressures from a broken tax system (the only OECD member state with no CGT other than Belgium) and record migration levels? Are those two policies not within government policy scope?
Nat-ACT promising to scrap FBB and reinstate tax deductibility on mortgage interest rates is an attempt to rescue the market by bringing back speculative demand for housing.
Just because OECD cowed countries favour CGT is no justification for saying the NZ tax system is broken without it, some logical argument is required to make the case.
Its still always the same house with the same utility value in the market and money is just the medium of exchange which asset price is determined by factors well outside the homeowners control.
As my comment above, its also the same land. Monetary price increases & decreases simply reflect the devaluation & revaluation of the medium of exchange - the RBNZs "efforts" over the last few years demonstrate this very clearly for everyone.
No country without private property rights has ever advanced civilisation far.
A property is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it, factoring in ROI etc. CGT comes out of the profits, it doesn't go on top of them. As much as landholders would like to imagine that they are in control of everything. They are still leaves in the breeze of the market.
The way I see it is every cent my property goes up is just 2 extra cents that my 3 children have to pay for theirs, there is no benefit to me of house prices going up at all. Oh sorry I can look at my valuation and fool myself into thinking I am rich, I could have a million dollars if my children and I where homeless.
Hamilton City Council
https://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/300814557/city-growth-strate…
Yes, interesting discussion. The interviewee suggested he didn't want to get into the politics of this - bu5t generally it is a purely political initiative meant to send a signal to the electorate that these parties are 'doing something' about the housing crisis.
Whether or not it is the right/most sensible thing to do was beyond the scope of their (Labour and National's) thinking.
So, I'll be political and say: it's a total waste of planner's time and resources folks. The medium density rules that had already been put in place under the NPS-UD were sensible and efficient. This additional MDRS layer or push regards urban density is dumb and inefficient.
Who wouldn't want to trade their north facing sun and beautiful view of the sparkling ocean for a shady view of the neighbours toilet window. It's a win win because the capital depreciation on your house would be massive and you'd have to pay far less for the future land tax.
Yep agree.
the NPS-UD is good and enables way more than enough housing capacity in the right locations. Because it is focused in certain areas it allows councils to focus their investment in to those areas.
The MDRS is going to lead to lots of ad hoc redevelopment scattered across the urban area. This is hard to plan for and is likely to lead to some nasty localised issues such as increased traffic congestion and flooding.
Totally agree. Bad planning and no match between infrastructure and density. So we'll get all the negatives of higher density with no upsides. Developers inevitably going to jam higher densities on cheaper sites distant from public transport, with neighbours suddenly looking at a 3 storey monstrosity 1m from their boundary. Another Labour-led fail. Councils such as HCC pushing back anyway.
When I struggle to figure out if something is beneficial or not, I often push whatever is proposed, to the extreme, I find this exaggerated hypothetical view, makes the outcome clearer. So, would it be better to have every NZ family living separately, in a different location in NZ, (so no townships) or would it be better to have all NZ citizens living in one single City. Think of the consequences for buying food, going to school, work, providing services, traffic, entertainment, restaurant, shops etc...
To me extremes are generally bad no matter which way you go, the answer usually lies somewhere in the middle. Having the population spread out too much is bad because you have to build a lot of infrastructure and there will be a lot of needless travel. Having just one condensed location puts you in to an unacceptable scenario if something bad happens there then we are all screwed. The key is to find the right middle ground, its hard but it needs to be done.
Other examples: Capitalism / Socialism, Woke, Environmentalism, Kindness, Hard on crime / soft on crime, abortion, property prices, inflation even Perfection. I can't actually think of anything that extremes work for.
Boosting urban density is good but with good planning. Removing one house of 300sqm and putting 8 shoe boxes is not planning. It's crap.
Make multiple storey apartments which walking spaces, pool, club house , BBQ areas. Ample parking.
We are making ghettos in name of urban density with shitty plans.
Yes, I'm with you there. That is good planning. Local/central governments could work to facilitate the consolidation of such land suitable for this type of development.
But they just want to take a scatter-gun approach to urban development, and leave the planning to market forces.
Yeah, right.
No, more a matter of buying up parcels - perhaps consolidate existing state housing sections with others next door (purchased on the open market) and/or combine with LG existing parks/reserves land that is under-utilised.
You'd be surprised how much land councils themselves own.
Or the government could use its powers and compulsorily acquire one of the massive sites in Auckland being land banked by Chinese land bankers. Then package sites up in a coordinated way and sell to developers, with conditions in terms of timeframes for delivery etc. This provides huge bang for buck, and you only hack off one big entity (a foreign one) rather than ordinary kiwis.
There’s multiple examples around Auckland, but this huge site (capacity for around 3000 dwellings) next to New Lynn centre is one of the best examples. The landowner has only delivered a few poxy terrace houses on a huge site over the past 7-8 years.
I'm with the above commenter about apartments. Korea does apartment developments really well. They all have the right utilities, well serviced, are a mix of 2, 3 and 4 bedrooms in most areas, have plenty of sunlight in all, are warm (underfloor heating) and are pretty attractive. And those were the ones I experienced that were built in the 80s. They were built in the suburbs, not the CBD.
Whereas many people in NZ see the leaky, poxy studio apartments built by some dodgy developer in the 1970s and say 'no thanks, not for me'.
This problem is happening a lot in Hamilton. The incentive to infill is great but without any coherent design/urban planning strategy is often just leading to randomly spaced cramped sections and apartments in the middle of suburbia. The underlying issues of suburban living are not addressed with density alone and cars still required for the majority of residents.
On the other hand, those wealthy enough to buy into planned 'villages' are able enjoy the true benefits of dense, well-planned urban living close to commercial centres.
Its not so much the location but the density of the density. The ad hoc townhouses are not really a huge jump in density when you zoom out a bit and consider the population of the suburb. Once you have a critical mass of people living within an area then a lot of networks and services develop and make it viable to live a fairly full life just within the area. There can and should be many CBDs within a city (I think in planning it is time we drop the 'Central' part). Paris is a good example of this. The main office area is actually on the outer edge of the city (depending how you define the city area) and the true centre is largely made up of tourist destinations. People live and work in a series of clusters spread around the city.
Exactly, it’s not.
The point is - as Kate and I say above - the NPS-UD’s requirements for rezoning to six storey apartments within walking distance of train stations and bigger centres was good, and sufficient.
By comparison the MDRS will generate a whole lot of unintended consequences.
It's not a comparison between good and better, but between bad and worse.
The NPS-UD was stuffed as a practical document as soon as they put the word 'well being' into it, ie a word that can be redefined by anyone in power to do as little as they want.
And yes the MDRS is worse.
What council? And what heritage areas? I think you might mean Auckland Council? But this type of forced imposition across most of urban New Zealand is nuts as a strategy to counteract the actions of a few noisy NIMBY's in Auckland.
They even made Kāpiti a Tier 2 council - and it's just been flagged as one of NZ's communities vulnerable to flooding (with no money to fix it);
So, yeah intensification sounds ideal there - NOT.
Don’t bother Kate, you won’t get any sense out of him. He’s a free market, neoliberal capitalist in progressive clothing. He fundamentally believes that getting rid of planning regulation will mean affordable housing is delivered. Totally naive, not to mention ignorant of the negative externalities it would create.
HouseMouse you use terms like “free market” as if they are a bad thing. When you go down to the supermarket do you ever think “gee I wish the government restricted what bread I can buy”? If you were poor would you be happy for the government to outlaw budget brand and force you to buy Vogels?
Do you honestly think Auckland would be worse if we didn’t have all this planning? We seem to have the worst of both worlds; poor urban form and stupid prices. It’s hard to know how you can support a system that has done so badly.
Did you actually listen to the recording? The unitary plan has been very successful in getting a whole lot of housing built.
You seem to be forgetting that decades and decades of ridiculously restrictive planning got us to where we are today. That can’t be redressed in just 6 years.
I never said the market is a bad thing, it’s not. But an almost religious belief, such as you seem to hold, that the market is the answer to all our woes, and that it needs to be freed from its shackles from regulation to deliver affordable housing is just so hilariously misguided.
And since you seem so interested in public transport, how is ad hoc medium density scattered across our city in an unplanned manner going to relieve congestion and support public transport?
And now you have not just me raising these issues, but arguably NZ’s most esteemed economic geographer saying this.
Food for thought on this fine Sunday morning. All that stamp-duty free; capital gains tax free Aussie owned property in Queenstown, for instance.
A Self-Managed Superannuation Fund can invest in properties overseas. This type of investment is not too different to investing in Australian property. The SMSF must have legal title over the overseas property.
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Labor super cap ‘could force a property and asset sell-off’. Self-managed super fund members are bracing to sell billions of dollars of unlisted investments such as houses, non-residential property and private companies if the government introduces a hard cap on superannuation balances. (AFR.Today)
I agree, having seen how Edinburgh functions from living there for several years, predominantly 3 story (basement floor included) conjoined housing or large tenemant buildings of flats, and no priority for any carparking on the majority. No new development is approved by council unless the planning includes a comprehenive modeled plan of how the public transport network would function with the layout and density, as well as flow on effects on public transport around the city as a result of the increased number of buses and cars on the roads. This is why it is meticulously hard to get any new development throuugh the council there, but given how public transport is fantastic there and relatively affordable, it seems to be working.
The '3 story, 3 dwellings, anywhere' piece could be made much more palatable, by becoming '2 story, 3 dwellings, anywhere'.
This will remove most of the sunlight and privacy issues, which are the main objections, while still being a very effective policy to unlock the suburbs.
Keep the '6 stories near transit' piece, work out how to manage infrastructure as the suburbs evolve ad-hoc, and you have a winning formula.
High density certainly doesn’t work everywhere it has been tried, and the market is punishing some owners for it.
Have a look at the Lakeside Te Kauwhata development, the 2 bedroom units on small sections there for sale are struggling to sell or rent for even what they cost pre-covid. Turns out small properties with no garage or off street parking don’t work when there is no public transport so each household still needs to own 2 cars (or 2 Ford Rangers, as is often the case).
Looks much the same for the acres and acres of tiny stand alone houses being built in Drury, Papakura and other parts of Auckland as well.
Hmm some quite protectionist comments here. Hard to know why people want Council and government to tell them where and what houses they can build, at the very least it leads to higher prices. Maybe the council should also choose what cars we can buy, what food we can eat, etc. Not only do you have to have a 5 million dollar stand alone house to live in Epsom, Council planning rules could also require an Audi, pool, and trophy wife.
I think a much fairer system would be a single set of planning rules for the whole city that just protects neighbours (such as height to boundary rules), but to build you also need to have adequate connectivity to resources like 3waters etc. The current planning rules seem to have very little to do with resource management and much more to do with wealth management.
Most of us are talking a pro-density position here, supportive of high density housing near train stations and centres. Ie. The NPS-UD approach. You realise that, together with existing zoning, would ensure Auckland has zoned capacity for 4-5 times the housing the city actually needs over the next 30 years.
I understand you are a public transport advocate (just like me). How is ad hoc, scattergun medium density housing across wide areas of the city going to support that?
The answer is it won’t. It will exacerbate congestion and worsen greenhouse gas emissions. That’s unlikely to be much better than sprawl.
What is the goal, a nice city or an affordable city? I’d prefer a nice city as you describe, but easy for me to say as I can afford it. If I was poor I would prefer scattergun medium density that I could afford over nothing.
I don’t understand the “zoned 4 times more than needed” argument. For example our section is probably zoned for 6 houses, but we don’t intend to have more than 1. If there was more than enough land zoned terraces and appartments then there wouldn’t be a premium for THAB zoning. Yet people are paying stupid money for THAB in South Auckland.
In a true free market wouldn’t people choose to live near a train station etc if they could afford to?
There won’t be a premium for THAB any more. The amount of THAB zoned land is increasing hugely under the NPS-UD requirements, something like 4-5 times?
Also land is a relatively small component of the total sales price of housing in Auckland in medium and high density development. Land values falling 20% might only realise a 5% reduction in sales price, if you are lucky.
Given there are so many sites with THAB or a centres zoning (that allows high density housing), you probably only need one in six or seven of your kind of suburban property to be redeveloped in to say 6 townhouses to provide all the housing Auckland needs, over a 30 year period. That’s completely plausible.
It’s basically the classic outcome of excessive regulation. We have a very regulated housing market and crazy unaffordable prices. And instead of considering a free market to fix it, we insist that we need the regulations but we just need to tweak it a bit.
Wealthy people like ourselves love free markets when it suits but when it comes to protecting our wealth we like regulation and insist the free market won’t work.
Most of the best cities in the world were built before planning really existed. The density naturally occurred near places that were desirable like city centres, train lines, etc.
Total bollocks.
Name me a city in the Anglosphere that has more liberal planning rules than Auckland ( pre-MDRS) in terms of medium and high density redevelopment potential. Or even close to the Unitary Plan.
I Look forward to your answer.
The question is an important one because anyone can throw around vague and unsubstantiated comments like ‘our very highly regulated housing market.’ How regulated a market is should best be judged in a relative or comparative sense.
A race to the bottom in terms of deregulation is most certainly not the way to realise affordable housing.
Ps. Even though the unitary plan is incredibly liberal by Anglosphere standards, I certainly supported the NPS-UD requirements. But the MDRS is just nuts.
Any city in Texas.
But the point is still being missed. The deregulation in places like Texas is on what the council can zone prior to the market determining its use.
But it is up to the market via the developer to then protect what the market has told the developer it wants to be protected, ie covenants. This is sort of how Body Corporates operate, ie with a set of rules that all owners buy into, and then only they can change (75% majority) as the years go by, which they do as the type of owner changes.
It's absolute stupidly to zone land prior to the market saying we want that type and at that price, and also when the land is not available to be developed immediately at the market rate of demand.
What we have in NZ is homeowners having previously handed over the zoning of their land/suburb/neighbourhood to the council to manage on their behalf, being betrayed (breaking their social contract) by the council when they change the zoning against the owners' wishes. However, owners could stop this if they got organized and covenanted their land as a neighbourhood, but that would be hard to organize.
I lived and developed in Texas for three years.
Houston for example, in parts, has far higher density than Auckland because the rules allow for the developer to build what the market wants, and all at a very low median income multiple.
The biggest failure in Auckland is that the cost of poor land use policies is pushing people out to find affordability. And the type of housing they are mostly forced into is not what they need but can only afford.
And the quality is average.
Your are not understanding how it works.
Raw land has our equivalent of no zoning until the market tells the developer what they need.
If the market says they want one, some or all in a certain density, then the developer can go for it.
Then that neighbourhood as part of that can say that is the way it will stay (covenants) for whatever amount of time.
They have far more freedom to build to whatever density the market wants, and it is far more affordable.
And Auckland having a theoretical widespread amount is not the same as having the ability to supply it at the rate and price the market wants.
So clearly not comparing apples with apples. Including that Houston is a much bigger city in a much bigger country, with huge economies of scale and cheap labour. You don’t think they have anything to do with the development that happens there and its market responsiveness?
I have also just checked their ordinances and they have parking and open space requirements more onerous than here. So not everything they have is more liberal than here.
So the neighbourhood only has its say on the development after its been approved? And can only further limit its development via covenant?
The size has nothing to do with the first principle of land policy.
If land size was a factor Australua would have the world's cheapest sections, not similar to NZ.
And because the land is cheaper to buy, then they can afford to have more open space which is seen as a negative in NZ.
I probably didn't explain the covenants well enough. If a developer knows his market, then he goes out buys the land, THEN zones it and registers the covenants that he knows his market wants, so they buy what he is offering.
NO council zone any land in anticipation of what they think the market wants.
Public organisation's are not reactive enough to offer what is needed at the rate of a true market demand .
It’s not. It’s completely misinformed nonsense.
btw if you think high density should not be prevented, why did you submit opposing higher density zoning in plan change 78 to the unitary plan?
the video featuring Doug Fairgray is good. He is a highly experienced and very respected urban geographer. Not some anonymous commenter on the internet who doesn’t have a clue what they are talking about.
As he says, the MDRS will result in scattered redevelopment across suburban Auckland. This will result in worsening traffic congestion, and is also hard to plan for in terms of infrastructure upgraded.
My point is - he did that, yet:
- he praises you and your extreme pro-density outlook
- he dismissed people on the North Shore opposing an apartment as unreasonable NIMBYs
The guy’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.
And he knows it because he always ignores it when I raise it.
1) There should be no density restrictions.
2) There should be no zoning
3) The rules should all be national based standards that are effects based (e.g. loss of sunlight, noise, smell, natural hazards, sea level, etc) so that the planners cant write plans & rules as high as the skytower.
4) We only have 5m people (the size of Sydney) yet we have so many organisations and plans its insane. We make it so so complicated.
5) The amount of deadweight lost time and extra cost to NZ is madness and its all central governments fault as successive governments failed to implement national standards.
6) The 15 new regional strategies need to be done now, not take 10 years to fully implement.
Its unbelievable. I despair for NZ.
I was raised in an outer London council house. Three floors high, one room wide and two rooms deep. Stair well in the middle. About 70 sq m floor area. A 3 m x 20 m garden at the back of the property. Part of a terraced subdivision with about 50 similar properties. One car port on the ground floor and additional street parking. Concrete block structure. Local high school 1 km m away. We considered ourselves relatively well off. One car family, no telephone. Walking distance to the local shops and pubs. Walking distance to the nearest underground and cheap access to the whole of London. People still live in them 50 years on. https://uksocialhousing.com/properties/HILLINGDON?page=9. Average value for those privately owned ~ NZ$720k. It can be done but might need a change in expectations for many in NZ.
In NZ milk was 4c a pint, petrol was about 1/2 of what it cost in the UK and a university education was free. We were glad to see the back of the dreary weather and traffic jams. Oh and houses were relatively cheap here too considering you could get a detached bungalow on a 1/4 acre at a good price. But of course NZ isn't like that any more. Now my wife suggests she might like to live in a tiny house.
I am actually not qualified as an economist, but I worked out relatively quickly, with a bit of luck in my choices of reading, where the failures in framing this issue have occurred in “economics” as a discipline. I tried occasionally to convince the expert participants on this forum, with no luck. Here we are quite a few years later, with all the accumulated evidence, with the experts still talking nonsense.
First, economic rent can be “extractive” or not. It was extractive before the automobile; think Victorians paying half their incomes for a tenement. Basically you are forced to pay the maximum you can stand, for the barest minimum the market can get away with supplying. Back in Victorian times, incomes were under pressure from extractive rent in a lot of things, including food. So housing rent gouges had to compete with food cost gouges and other things, for the household budget. Life was pretty grim.
Transport, refrigeration and free trade is what eliminated extractive economic rent in most products; there was no supplier group who had extractive pricing powers due to proximity to markets. The ability to enter markets for supply purposes was extended to land almost anywhere, which meant superabundance was possible for the first time. The share of household income needed to be dedicated to food fell to well below 20% even as the amount and quality of the food increased considerably.
Automobile based development did the same eventually for land for housing. Subjecting automobile based development to rationing merely restores the old Victorian extractive land pricing. It is the presence or absence of superabundance of the essential resource input that makes the difference. We did spend several decades with housing increasing in size and quality with a median multiple of around 3, or share of household income hovering around 30%.
I described all this in a Quadrant Magazine article in 2013.
Second, site values are highly elastic to allowed density when the market is in this extractive condition, and this elasticity runs the wrong way. The tighter people can be crammed in, the MORE they can be gouged for the typical housing unit; nothing ends up any less than double the price of what used to be the median housing unit, a multi-bedroom stand-alone house. The price of the site can be tens or hundreds of times higher, to push the cost of finished housing up to such an extent.
All the evidence points this way and no attempts by conceited politicians and “planners” and their incompetent “economist” advisors have succeeded in proving anything else is the decisive factor.
Economists all need to be made to write the above out 100 times after work. One cannot completely blame the "Green" ideologues who pass for "urban planners" today, when economists en mass have so completely failed to get conceptually on top of this issue. "Planners" were accurately skewered by Hayek decades ago; our contemporary "urban" version is no better than the ones who ruined the Russian and Eastern European macroeconomies in the 20th century.
I am not even sure whether the NZ expert who has the chutzpah to call himself "Market Economics" is an economist, or rather just another "planner". 2023 in NZ housing is like 1985 in the former Eastern Bloc. If you still don't get it, you're like an enemy of humanity desperately still hoping the regime will survive rather than be consigned to the oblivion it is deservedly overdue for.
Great to see you repost on Interest.co.nz Phil.
If people don't understand what you have just explained, they are probably an economist or planner.
I can just imagine giving some of these economists and planners a 'join the dots book,'
It would look like a surrealist painting.
Not just the large cities being affected. Under the Christchurch umbrella, small townships like Rolleston, Lincoln, Prebbleton are being captured. Well planned growth and intensification is OK, and (in places) needed. Blanket application is appalling knee jerk policy. Thank goodness CCC have pushed back, and seeking a more thought out implementation. Shame on Selwyn District Council for not doing the same.
I will listen to the podcast but from the write up I believe what Doug is saying rings true. While I also accept that the housing market is complex and influenced by many factors, I believe it has been low interest rates, and the expectation of rising house prices (i.e. profit) which have really driven the prices to the heights we have seen.
Many reports and studies have been done on the housing shortage, which I believe did exist. Planning has been given a lot of blame, which is fair, but is often blamed as the main culprit.
The Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Act was not entirely focused on the so called big cities. It applied to all cities that had a housing shortage providing the local government asked for it if certain criteria applied. It is interesting to see the amount of push back against permitting what people want. As a larger residential landlord I see my tenants mostly prefer higher density despite all the rules preventing it. Much is shouted from the roof tops about first home buyers yet why does NZ not copy the assistance given to them in countries like UK and other countries.
Places that meet the conventional definition of "Nice" places also quite often don't work that well, and productive, energetic, interesting places are not necessarily pretty.
At the moment the Dunedin Council is revamping the main street through the CBD to one lane, one way - in line with the previous Councillor's plans which ran against the wishes of their own staff, the consultant they hired, and a lot of the public - and it's becoming a piece of bland, safe, urban-design-by-committee (it's all grey stone and concrete with a few plantings). I just pray that it doesn't become like the Christchurch CBD when they tried similar in the 1980s and 90s: an intimidating ghost-town after about 6pm, with ever-more businesses fleeing to outlying areas.
The message may be that the rigid, theory-driven, politicised, contestable nature of our urban planning and design has to change, and change fast, to adapt. Just don't demand that what results meets some middle of the road theories of prettiness at the expense of functionality.
Whether it's the right way to go or not, you can be sure the public was was not fully consulted or listened to (even though the council will not doubt insist otherwise). You can be sure the silent public majority was silent because they were too busy doing other stuff to think about what was going on around them and assumed everyone else must know and approve. This process will repeat where 15-minute cities are concerned. The world is a small place and the same fundamental agenda is playing out in the UK. It's interesting to note that 93% of those surveyed in Oxford were against the place being sectioned up into 15-minute zones. But the council decided to do it anyway. It's an agenda, you see.
https://www.weforum.org/events/sustainable-development-impact-summit-20…
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