A slow moving event, highlighted by rain.

With all the rain, I'm sitting above South D, watching it turn in to a lake - the local high school's sports fields are one sheet of water, as is the local park, and there is a lot of surface flooding visible on the streets.

That said, it was mostly swamp, so it's also mostly reclaimed land.

South D is mostly a low decile area and the council is openly saying the low-lying parts will have to be gradually abandoned. However: no-one has said a word about where all the people who are the least able to pay are going to go - particularly since the large green belt is regarded as sacrosanct by the preservationists, but there are heavy controls on the development that restricts the amount of building land to try and densify the city - while still mandating low density development on any city-edge developments. 

So: a market designed to push up land costs while uglifying the city with minimum cost infill houses and dormitory suburban development.

The land our hugely expensive hospital is being built on is also reclaimed and not far above the water table either - when there was a good spot in Wakari, on the Leslie Groves Hospital site, which is stable, elevated and reasonably flat, but apparently not the politically preferred solution.

We just will not get out of our own way, and it may be that Dunedin's lack of insurability, development politicisation and unintended-consequence planning rules are going to accelerate the slide even further in to provincial city status.