Our Vision
Advocating for Hāwea since 1989
The Hāwea Community Association has represented the Lake Hāwea and Hāwea Flat community since 1989. We are a volunteer-run, membership-based association, governed by an elected committee, existing to advocate for the community's interests and to hold and communicate its collective vision for the area's future. (See [About HCA →] )
We run two or more annual public meetings, a social media presence to stay connected to the community, this website, engage with and fund a number of local initiatives annually, and periodically refresh the community vision through public engagement work, focused workshops, and regular discussions with the various groups also working to preserve what's special about this place.
We carry the community's vision forward into every conversation we have with Council, developers, and other decision-makers. This page sets out the most recent formal expression of that vision, and the twenty years of consistent community input that stand behind it.
Shaping Our Future: the current vision
In 2021–2022, the HCA worked with Shaping Our Future to run a community-wide visioning process. That work stands as our current, formally adopted vision. It combined a public workshop (39 attendees), a follow-up survey (49 responses), and a ten-person community task force who spent several months turning what they heard into a shared set of priorities and a spatial masterplan for the area. A further public workshop tested those priorities with around 40 attendees before the report was handed to the HCA for adoption and ongoing custodianship.
The resulting priorities, in the community's own ranking, centred on:
- Growth that is managed and delivers real benefit to the community, not just density
- Protecting the environment and the lake
- Better walking, cycling, and public transport connections
- A landscape plan and stronger pest/weed control
- Improvements to the lakefront reserve
These priorities, and the values behind them, remain the basis for the positions the HCA takes on planning, development, and infrastructure matters on the community's behalf.
Key elements of the vision
The 2022 report didn't appear from nowhere. What follows draws on three separate rounds of community engagement — 2003, 2015, and 2021–22 — run by different people, using different methods, twenty years apart. The community that has known its own mind for a long time.
A place worth protecting
Across all three processes, the same handful of things top the list of what people value: a strong sense of community, the natural environment and the lake, and a quiet, small-scale, slower pace of life. In 2003 that showed up as a vision of a "village feel," free of high fences and street lights, where people knew each other. In 2022, asked to describe success for Hāwea in one word, the community's answers clustered overwhelmingly around community and peaceful — almost word for word what earlier participants said in different language. This is what people are actually here for, and what they don't want traded away as the area grows.
Growth: welcomed, but on our terms
Every review has landed in roughly the same place on growth — not opposed to it, but passionate that it happen on the community's terms, not developers'. The 2003 and 2015 plans expressed this through hard boundaries: an urban growth line at Cemetery Road, land kept in rural zoning between the townships, no "ribbon development" strung out along the roads. By 2022, with growth having consistently outpaced every earlier prediction, the emphasis shifted from drawing a line to shaping what happens inside it — a masterplan approach aimed at making sure any future growth still delivers parks, services, and infrastructure the community actually needs, rather than density for its own sake. The throughline across twenty years is the same: growth should follow a plan the community had a hand in, not the other way around.
Environment and the lake
Protecting Lake Hāwea and its surrounds is a constant, not a fashion. The 2003 plan called for all stormwater and sewage to be disposed of well away from the lake, and for water quality to be kept to the highest possible standard — a position reaffirmed in 2015 as Council upgraded local treatment infrastructure. In 2022, lake water quality and shoreline erosion management ranked among the community's very highest priorities, alongside pest and weed control and a call for a proper landscape plan for the wider area. One thread runs through all three: protecting the night sky. Low-level, downward-facing lighting has been requested since 2003, and by 2022 a Dark Sky Reserve had become one of the most popular individual projects put to the community for a vote.
Getting around
Walking and cycling links have been requested in every single review — and this is one of the few places where a twenty-year-old aspiration has actually been delivered: the Hāwea River Track, first proposed in 2003, was reported complete and genuinely well-used by 2015. Rather than resting on that success, the 2022 process made cycleways the single highest-scoring project in the entire masterplan. What's new in 2022 is public transport — barely mentioned in 2003 or 2015, it now sits as an early, practical priority, a sign of how much the population (and the daily reality of getting to Wānaka) has changed since those earlier plans were written.
A place to gather
The Hāwea Domain has been identified as the community's natural focal point in every review — a shared, central space that development plans and pedestrian links should build around, not bypass. Alongside it, the community consistently asked for the practical, everyday things a growing settlement needs but didn’t yet have in full: a supermarket, a medical centre, better parks and recreation spaces, and — in 2022 specifically — a proposed market square and defined town centre, a genuine heart, rather than just a strip of shops.
Local economy, local character
Every review has pushed back against the idea of Hāwea becoming a generic tourist strip. From 2003's insistence on locally-owned businesses and alpine-style buildings with "no chain stores or chain restaurants," through to 2022's continued preference for small-scale, community-oriented commercial precincts, the message hasn't moved: visitors are welcome, but the area's shops and services should exist for residents first, at a scale that fits the place. Visitor accommodation has consistently been supported in principle but expected to sit within, not dominate, the residential character of the townships — with the community wanting a genuine say in where any expansion happens.
Housing that keeps us together
As far back as 2003, the community was asking developers to set aside a share of new sections for smaller, more affordable homes, specifically to keep the community diverse rather than pricing younger families and long-term locals out. That concern resurfaced strongly in 2022, with support for a wider range of housing types — including smaller and more affordable options — as one way to manage growth without hollowing out who actually gets to live here.
Being heard
Underneath all of the above sits one consistent, and increasingly pointed, request: that Council and developers actually listen. Each plan was explicitly built to give the community a documented position it could put in front of decision-makers — that was the entire purpose of the 2003 plan, the reason the 2015 review fed directly into the District Plan process, and, in 2022, an explicit attempt to reset a relationship between the community, Council, and developers that had reached a genuine low point. The tools have evolved — from a single community workshop in 2003 to workshops, surveys, and task forces by 2022 — but the underlying ask has never changed: that this community's views, tested and re-tested over two decades, should carry real weight in decisions about its own future.
This is yours to shape
This vision belongs to the community, not to any one committee. If you'd like to have a say in what it becomes next:
[Become a member →] Join the association and have a formal voice in its direction.
[Have your say →] Contribute to a current survey or consultation.
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Vision developed through community consultation, 2021–2022. Report published by Shaping Our Future Inc, October 2022, and adopted by the HCA. Informed by the 2003 Hāwea 2020 Community Plan and the 2015 Hāwea Community Plan Review.