Housing targets have long been a political football. They are also an emotional political subject. Would it not be better to take some of the heat out of the housing debate and ask more systematically how we could better plan for future housing supply?

Auckland’s housing target shrank twice to find a politically acceptable number. The Council had already spent $13 million preparing a plan change. More than 10,000 Aucklanders submitted. Then the Prime Minister decided the number was wrong. Maurice Williamson warned it would cost National votes, and the housing target had become, in Minister Bishop’s own words, “a red herring that transformed into a lightning rod.”

When asked about the numbers, Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown said: “How many clouds are going past? It never really mattered much. People focus on the wrong thing here.” He was right. Housing targets give people a headline to fight about and a reason to ignore everything underneath.

New Zealand has run its planning system on “predict and provide” for decades. Councils forecast how many people will live in their city, turn that into a housing number, and zone just enough land to accommodate it on paper. Auckland has met its capacity targets for years while house prices kept climbing.

In 2019, Environment Court Judge Jackson compared this style of planning to the “Soviet model of setting aside X hectares for the production of pig iron.” The logic is the same: a central authority decides how much is needed and allocates a quantity on paper. Job done.

Urban economist Alain Bertaud was blunt about this when he visited New Zealand earlier this year. In public lectures and on The New Zealand Initiative’s podcast, he warned: do not put projections into regulation. Forecasts are always wrong. When a forecast becomes a rule, it straitjackets a city. And when it becomes a headline, it becomes a political weapon.

There is a different way to hold public planners in councils to account. Instead of asking “have we planned enough for a theoretical number of houses?” we should be asking “do the rules give people and businesses real and affordable choices, or force them into bidding wars over scarce permissions, driving up prices?” The second question is harder to game. Unlike housing targets, prices cannot be fudged.

What would a system built on market evidence look like? Start with what we already have. Our roads and pipes serve a certain number of people right now. Work backwards from that: calculate what our existing transport and utility networks can support, and set that as the minimum floor for zoning. If the infrastructure can handle more than the council has zoned for, zoning is too restrictive. No argument.

Then look at where people want to live. You can create a heat map of demand showing what buyers pay for location alone, independent of house size, zoning (planner’s rules), and everything else. Compare that map to where councils have provided zoning capacity. If demand is concentrated in central suburbs but permissive zoning is all in outer suburbs, the plan is dodging the market and blocking people from providing houses in places where they want to live.

If you measure large price jumps at zone boundaries in the city and at the urban-rural edge, plans are too tight and rationing land.

Then check whether the rules are inflating the cost of land as an input to housing. Land is the single biggest cost in a new home, and it becomes artificially expensive when zoning is restrictive. You can measure this directly: divide the price of land by the amount of floor space allowed. When the rules bite, land prices get high relative to permitted floor space.

Grade the council’s previous plan against all of this before making a new one. Flag what is wrong. Correct for what straitjackets instead of headline numbers. Make sure rules produce affordable land in places people want to live.

And watch it annually. The Planning Bill’s new standardised zoning and national e-plan make this possible. An independent expert panel can track these indicators across the country regularly, using real sales data, and overrule bad planning.

The New Zealand Initiative’s research notes on competitive urban land markets and the suite of price-cost indicators set out what legislation needs and how transition would work.

It will never be possible to completely take the politics out of housing, but an expert panel does two things: it puts a layer between communities and politicians so that decisions do not directly expose Ministers; and it shifts the focus from headline numbers to the real question. Do the rules make our cities more affordable and productive, or not?

This should make housing debates calmer, more rational and conducive to delivering the housing outcomes New Zealand needs.