New Zealand (national MDRS): Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS)

In late 2021 New Zealand did something unusual in housing politics: the two largest parties, who normally oppose each other, agreed on a single national rule that would override local council zoning across the country's biggest cities. The rule was called the Medium Density Residential Standards, or MDRS, and it allowed three homes of up to three storeys on most urban sites without the owner needing special planning permission first. It was delivered through the Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2021, which passed its third and final reading on 14 December 2021 and received royal assent on 20 December 2021.

What made it remarkable was the politics. The governing Labour Party and the opposition National Party put their joint names to the change, supported also by the Green Party and the Māori Party, with only the libertarian ACT Party voting against it (source). The stated goal was supply: the government projected the change could enable roughly 105,500 new homes over the following eight years (source). For a country with some of the least affordable housing in the developed world, a national rule that let homeowners build a few extra homes by right looked like a shared answer that could outlast any single government.

That last assumption — that a bipartisan rule would prove durable — is the part that did not hold, and it is the most useful lesson for British Columbia.

The core of the MDRS was a set of numbers that applied as a permitted activity, meaning a property owner could build to those limits without first applying for resource consent (New Zealand's term for discretionary planning approval). On most urban residential sites, the standards allowed up to three dwellings of up to three storeys, with a maximum building height of 11 metres (source).

Beyond the headline three-by-three rule, the standards set out the everyday details that decide whether a building actually fits on a lot. Building coverage was capped at 50% of the net site area. Ground-floor outdoor living space had to be at least 20 square metres, and upper-level outdoor space at least 8 square metres with a minimum dimension of 1.8 metres (source). The standards also covered setbacks from boundaries and height in relation to neighbouring boundaries; a project that breached any of these triggers would lose its permitted status and need consent (source).

The design of the rule mattered as much as the numbers. By making the three-home outcome a permitted activity, the law removed the single biggest source of delay and cost in New Zealand development: the discretionary consent process, where a council planner, and sometimes objecting neighbours, can attach conditions, demand changes, or refuse the project outright. Permitted means the council checks the plans against the fixed standards and, if they comply, the build proceeds. There is no negotiation and no public objection over whether three homes should exist on the site.

The MDRS was not a suggestion that councils could take or leave. It was a mandate aimed at the cities under the most housing pressure — the so-called Tier 1 urban areas. The territorial authorities required to write the standards into their district plans were Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, the Wellington region, and Christchurch, plus Rotorua Lakes District Council (source). Those councils were required to include the MDRS in their plans from August 2022 (source).

In practice the rollout reached a wider group of councils. By the time the policy came under review in 2024, the government referred to 15 relevant councils caught by the medium density requirements, of which eight had already completed the plan changes to put the MDRS into force (source). That detail — that many councils had already done the legal work to adopt the rule — turned out to matter a great deal when a later government tried to reverse course, because you cannot cleanly cancel a rule that is already operative in a council's plan.

The combination of a national floor (three homes, by right) and a mandatory rollout to the busiest urban councils is what made the MDRS so far-reaching. It was not a model code that councils could adopt at their own pace. It was a standard that Parliament forced onto local plans, on a fixed timetable, in the places where most New Zealanders live.

The bipartisan agreement did not survive a change of government. After the 2023 general election, a National-led coalition with ACT and New Zealand First took office — and National, which had co-sponsored the MDRS only two years earlier, now moved to unwind the mandatory part of its own policy. On 4 July 2024, Housing Minister Chris Bishop announced stage one of a programme called Going for Housing Growth. Among its six changes was a commitment to make the MDRS optional for councils rather than mandatory (source).

The reversal was delivered through the Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Act 2025, which passed into law on 20 August 2025 (source). The new Act did not flatly delete the MDRS everywhere. Instead it created a specific, conditional exit for two councils: it enables Auckland Council and Christchurch City Council to opt out of the MDRS while still being required to provide sufficient housing capacity (source). The Act does not give other councils the same power to remove the standards (source).

The opt-out came with strings. Auckland has to prepare a replacement plan change providing at least as much housing capacity as the MDRS plan change it is withdrawing, and Christchurch can only withdraw if it can show enough feasible capacity for 30 years of housing demand plus a 20% contingency (source). Both moved quickly to use it: Auckland Council partially withdrew Plan Change 78 — the change that had inserted the MDRS into the Auckland Unitary Plan — at 5pm on 9 October 2025, and Christchurch sought ministerial approval to withdraw the equivalent parts of its Plan Change 14 (source).

The 2025 Act is not the end of the story; it is the first step in a larger plan to retire the MDRS entirely. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Development is explicit that the Act does not let councils other than Auckland and Christchurch remove the standards, and that the government instead intends for the MDRS to be replaced as part of a later, Phase 3 resource management reform (source). In other words, the standards are being wound down in stages: an immediate, conditional exit for the two largest councils now, and a broader replacement framework for everyone else later.

The practical result as of this writing is a patchwork. Auckland and Christchurch are working their way out of the MDRS through bespoke processes, while the standards still apply in the other Tier 1 areas — Hamilton, Tauranga and Wellington retained them (source). A rule that began life as a single national standard applied uniformly across the country's biggest cities has, within four years, fractured into a city-by-city question of whether the three-home right exists at all.

It is worth being precise about what changed and what did not. The MDRS was never struck down as bad policy on the merits in a way that erased the homes it had already enabled. What changed was its status: from a binding national mandate to an optional standard that the largest councils were given a path to escape, with a stated intention to replace it wholesale down the line. The supply ambition was not formally abandoned — Going for Housing Growth sets its own housing capacity targets — but the specific, by-right, three-homes-everywhere mechanism was deliberately dismantled.

The national MDRS did not arrive in a vacuum. Auckland had already run its own large upzoning years earlier, and that history is part of why the national rule looked credible. When the Auckland Unitary Plan became operative in 2016, the city rezoned roughly three-quarters of its residential land to allow medium- and high-density housing (source). It was one of the largest single upzonings carried out by a Western city, and it created a real-world test of whether letting people build more actually produces more homes.

The evidence from that test was strong enough to influence the national debate. Research by economist Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy found that dwellings consented per year in upzoned Auckland areas rose from under 1,000 in 2016 to near 10,000 by 2021, and estimated that the upzoning was responsible for roughly 26,903 additional dwellings being consented (source). The findings have been contested — some analysts argue the trend break is less clear once certain data is included (source) — but the broad picture of a large supply response gave national legislators a local precedent to point to.

There is a structural link as well. When Auckland was forced to adopt the national MDRS in 2022, it did so through Plan Change 78, layered on top of the Unitary Plan it had already upzoned in 2016. So when Auckland used the 2025 opt-out, what it withdrew was specifically the MDRS plan change — not the entire 2016 upzoning, which remains a separate, earlier layer of intensification rules. The national mandate and the city's own reform are two distinct measures, and unwinding the first does not automatically unwind the second.

For British Columbia the most direct comparison is the province's own small-scale multi-unit housing reform. British Columbia's Bill 44, the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023, received royal assent on 30 November 2023 — almost exactly two years after New Zealand's MDRS — and works on the same basic idea of forcing local zoning to allow several homes on lots that previously permitted only one. Under Bill 44, municipalities over 5,000 people generally must allow at least three units on single-family or duplex lots of 280 square metres or smaller, at least four units on larger lots, and as many as six units on larger lots close to frequent transit, with bylaws required to be updated by 30 June 2024 (source).

The mechanics are close cousins — both are top-down mandates that strip single-family-only zoning and set a minimum number of homes by right. But the politics that surround them differ in one decisive way. New Zealand's MDRS was a national law passed with cross-party agreement, and it was still reversed within four years when a new government simply changed the rule it had previously co-sponsored. British Columbia's Bill 44 is a provincial law passed by a single governing party, and it has remained in force. The lesson is not that one level of government is inherently more reliable than another. It is that bipartisan support at the moment of passage does not, on its own, make a reform permanent. New Zealand's MDRS had broader political backing than Bill 44 ever did, and it was the one that got unwound.

The New Zealand experience is a warning aimed squarely at anyone counting on BC's small-scale multi-unit rules to stay in place. The MDRS shows that a national upzoning can be technically sound, can demonstrably produce homes, and can carry the rare endorsement of both major parties — and still be made optional and earmarked for replacement once a new government decides the politics have shifted. Durability is not a free byproduct of good policy or broad initial support. It has to be built into how the reform is structured.

Several practical points follow for British Columbia. First, the homes already built under a by-right rule are the rule's best insurance. New Zealand's 2025 Act did not, and arguably could not, claw back the dwellings the MDRS had already enabled; what it changed was future status. In BC terms, the faster owners actually build the three-to-six units Bill 44 permits, the more entrenched the policy becomes, because reversing zoning is far harder once thousands of homes physically exist under it. Second, the conditions attached to New Zealand's opt-out matter: even when Auckland and Christchurch were allowed to leave the MDRS, they had to replace its capacity, not simply delete it (source). A reform that ties any future exit to maintaining housing capacity is harder to gut than one that allows a clean repeal.

Third, and most important, BC homeowners and builders should treat the current rules as a window, not a guarantee. The same forces that unwound a bipartisan national mandate in New Zealand — a change of government, neighbourhood pushback, and a council preference for local control — exist in British Columbia too. The MDRS went from mandatory across the country's biggest cities to optional for its two largest councils in under four years (source). For a property owner weighing whether to build now under permissive zoning or wait, that timeline is the whole argument: the right to build several homes by right is real today, but it is a political settlement, not a permanent feature, and political settlements can be revisited.