by Geoffrey Churchman

The meeting of the Paraparaumu Community Board on Tuesday evening attracted about 20 members of the public who had come to hear what Ian Cassells of The Wellington Company had to present on this.

Little information is available on the company’s website, and not a whole lot more got shown at the meeting; but the most significant slide was this one:

This shows the land divided into 12 blocks which is currently before KCDC’s planner for Resource Consent. Ian Cassells also said there was an application to the GWRC although I can’t see how they would be involved.

Although 300 x 2 = 600 residential lots are mentioned on this map, at the meeting a slide indicated that there would be 1,000 residential units, which is a big number. Presumably that total includes the “aged care development” block which must mean another retirement village.

They want to build all the houses themselves but will seek other partners for the commercial and retail buildings.

It seemed as if ‘Drainage Reserve’ shown in periwinkle on the map involves a realignment of the Wharemauku Stream ‘back to how it was originally’. See this article by Roger Childs from 2021 on the stream.

The area dedicated to the Whalesong project will need to be moved to a different part of this development; they seem to be OK with that.

A pic I took of the area from the southwest corner under the Ewy. The Wharemauku Stream is out of sight below the line of grass in the centre.
As can be seen, significant new roading consists of a T with the top of the T being a curving connection and extension of Ihakara Street then north to Kapiti Road opposite the insection at Arawhata Road. The stem of the T consists of an extension west from Iver Trask Place.
Existing residential units at the west end of Ihakara Street, a pic I took last month.

Viewed objectively, putting housing on this large chunk of presently vacant land seems a sensible use to make of it, given the housing shortage that the country has, but the nature of it will need much scutiny. But will there be the demand for the amount of ‘Large Format Retail’ (read ‘big box stores’) given that the old large Placemakers store on Kapiti Road is still unoccupied? It’s not the only one.

People are very apprehensive about the Globalist ’15-minute city’ concept. Wouldn’t a lot more houses be better instead of the commercial areas?

Infrastructure — will KCDC need to build a lot more of it? The financial boffins there have long seen a lot more Ratepayers as the way to fund their never-ending massive expenditure on operations, but there ain’t no free lunch. Will the drinking water, waste, and stormwater pipes and pumping and processing needs get a lot of upgrading to cope? What about recreation and pastime needs for people? And what about traffic congestion around Paraparaumu? 

These are questions that will be followed by locals with considerable interest.