Reshaping Aotearoa’s Planning Laws: Regenerative Housing, Community Agency, and Structural Affordability 

New Zealand’s housing problems stem from a system producing unaffordable, isolating, and environmentally harmful outcomes. Now is a major opportunity as the government rewrites the Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill. Zola summarizes her submission, urging laws to explicitly enable regenerative land use, community-led development, and structural affordability, including a national definition and permitted status for tiny homes, rural cluster housing/eco-villages, mixed-use “circular economy village” models, inclusionary zoning incentives, and legal recognition and support for cooperatives and community land trusts, with housing treated as a human right. Zola advocates transitioning from resource-intensive animal agriculture to plant-based land use with farmer pathways.