The infrastructure NZ can’t afford to keep

By Rebekah White

After the automotive industry abandoned Flint, Michigan, the population shrank from about 200,000 in 1970 to barely 80,000 today.

The tax base became so small it was impossible for the council to afford the upkeep of the infrastructure.  

Sometimes, there was only one occupied house remaining on a block, surrounded by empty buildings, says Dr Tim Welch, a senior lecturer in transportation planning at the University of Auckland.

Flint’s city managers devised a plan to buy people out, but the project was rushed and didn’t acknowledge the deep connections people had to their homes.

“The city had waited just too long to even broach this subject, so people weren’t willing to move,” says Welch.

“People had lived in that house; their kids grew up in that house; they were too connected.”

After Flint abandoned the buy-out plan, the city fell deeper into financial crisis.

A few years later, to save money, it stopped buying treated water from nearby Detroit and diverted the water from the Flint River using old pipes that leached lead.

The lead in the water poisoned tens of thousands of its residents, in what one academic described as “the most egregious example of environmental injustice in recent US history”.

Flint is an extreme example of what can happen when urban shrinkage isn’t planned.

But this kind of population degrowth is something New Zealand should be thinking about, says Welch, and not only because industries move; climate change is increasingly affecting marae, homes, and infrastructure.

“At some point,” says Welch, “it makes sense to think about what infrastructure we don’t necessarily need, that’s redundant, that’s inefficient, that’s not serving the purpose it was originally meant to, or that may be extraordinarily vulnerable.”

Which roads or utilities should be maintained and which decommissioned?

The problem with New Zealand’s infrastructure

“We’ve got massive challenges with infrastructure,” says Theuns Henning, an associate professor in engineering and design at the University of Auckland.

“Our assets are old and deteriorated, so there’s a huge replacement need, especially in the water sector.

"There’s also massive demand growth, which is, for the size of our economy, quite a big challenge."

Fundamentally, New Zealand has the same problem as Flint – but on a different scale, and for different reasons, says Henning.

“The reason why we’re so vulnerable is because we’ve got a massive asset base for a very small population and economy. In the old days, especially in the rural areas, politicians promised farmers, ‘We’re going to seal your road.’ Many of our networks have grown outside of our means to maintain it.”

Councils, he says, are biased towards creating new assets instead of maintaining existing ones.

“If you’re the mayor, you want to cut red ribbons, and you cut red ribbons when you build something new.”

That often means neglecting maintenance.New Zealand cities have large footprints that are difficult for councils to maintain – not because people and industries have left, but because of the way cities have been developed.

“The [lack of] density in Auckland is shocking by world standards, and it makes it very, very expensive,” says Henning. “Because if you’ve got a much denser-populated environment, it is much more cost-efficient – public transport, the length of roads you have, the length of pipe you have, all of that.”

Auckland continues to make significant policy changes to encourage vertical growth rather than further sprawl. But there are other options.

Tackling the hard choices coming up

As extreme weather intensifies, and as floods and landslides become more frequent, more and more homeowners and local authorities will face difficult decisions about what to do with their assets. Move? Retreat? Build higher?

It helps to think through several defined approaches to risk, says Henning.

You can avoid the risk, by moving something out of harm’s way – managed retreat.

You can accept the risk: decide the risk is low enough you’ll ignore it. (The risk of a volcanic eruption in Auckland is one the city simply accepts.)

You can control the risk, which Henning describes as “the engineering solution: so, we build, we make it stronger, we make it bigger, higher, whatever”.

Or you can transfer the risk – have insurance take it on instead. That one won’t always work, as insurers are increasingly moving out of high-risk areas.

“The big question that’s going to drive climate resilience in the future is the insurance market,” says Henning.

There are two other important factors: information and time.

Delaying a decision can sometimes be the smartest response, says Henning, especially when the future is uncertain.

“The power of time is incredible. It reduces your uncertainty.

"If I say that this road is going to be under water in 20 years, and we can wait another 10 years and see, ‘How long do I have?’"

Time allows decision-makers to save money and gather better information – but sometimes decisions must be made in the face of huge uncertainties.

Making decisions in uncertain times

Henning is working with overseas researchers to help cities reduce uncertainty around decision-making – to game out various crises, and to test where investment might reduce their impact.

Wellington is one of three case-study cities in this global partnership.

“Take flooding as an example, which is quite a big issue,” he says.

“There’s actually a part of Wellington that’s almost at sea level, so it’s a flood-prone area.”

What are your options, as a city manager? You can deal with floods as they occur. You can try to prevent them with flood protection, or by building extra flood storage capacity.

“All of those things, of course, have a different cost, but at the same time give you a different return on your investment.”

Researchers have designed a simulator that allows planners to game out various scenarios: if they spent $50 million now, or tomorrow, or in 10 years, on various options: what would happen when flooding hit?

These decisions are tough because they don’t involve concrete factors.

“You’re talking the whole time about deep uncertainty,” says Henning.

“There’re scenarios of what can hit you. There’re scenarios of what you can make stronger. What we basically show is where those two connect.”

Can we not just give this problem to artificial intelligence?’ AI is useful for mass-processing information, says Henning.

“But AI is only recognising patterns. Often what we get in climate events is something that we’ve never seen before, and that’s where AI falls over.”

Future-planning decisions like these ones are “emotional”, says Henning, and specific to places and communities, to people’s appetites for risk and overall security.

“We cannot use AI to make decisions,” he says.

One path forward

Infrastructure faces a set of common problems the world over. It gets old and falls apart. It gets damaged or destroyed by natural disasters. Populations outgrow it or move away.

The reality, says Henning, is that we’ll never have enough money to get on top of it all.

Instead, we need to make better, more strategic decisions that focus on what matters most to each community.

From 2011 to 2013, the community of Oakwood Beach in Staten Island, New York City, experienced a once-in-300-years rain event, then a 200-year storm, then a 500-year hurricane.

After that, residents decided they didn’t want to stick around for another 1000 years’ worth of weather, so they organised a government buyout of their properties.

Then, they restored the land.

“They returned all that coastal property back to as natural environment as they could,” says Welch.

“They tried to turn the coastal areas of an island back into a sponge, so it can absorb the impacts of the next storms and sea-level rise.”

The project was successful because it was driven by residents, says Welch – in contrast to how Flint’s planned retreat was managed.

“Flint was an example of the government trying to come in and tell residents it’s time to shrink, but for Oakwood Beach on Staten Island, that was a citizen-driven initiative.“

"They volunteered for the buyout, and the government met them in the middle with a subsidy.

"As a result, the entire island is now much less vulnerable to climate change."

The world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges. Planetary Solutions, an initiative of the Sustainability Hub at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, and Newsroom, explores these issues – and the practical ways we can all be part of the solution.