The Greens released their housing policy in the wake of the earthquake and it got lost in the news. They just can’t seem to catch a break, they announced Chloe Swarbrick’s candidacy right after Trump won and no one noticed that either.
The Greens are great at policy, hopeless at selling it. This latest wonkfest reeks of central Wellington wannabe bureaucrats which when you consider the political climate for anti-establisment, as cited by Bryce Edwards in this 5 year NZ google search for the term…
…seems about as anti-establishment as a Christian family outing.
The house that wonk built has some great ideas but try gaining an understanding from this…
1) Progressive home ownership
As a part of a government-build programme, the Green Party will make 10,000 new homes over ten years available to people who can’t afford a deposit or a normal commercial mortgage, through progressive ownership rent-to-buy arrangements.Progressive home owners will pay a weekly payment of no more than 30 percent of their income. Part of each payment will be rent to cover the Crown’s costs. The rest will purchase equity shares in the home. Over time, with each regular payment, ownership of the home will transfer from the government to the people who live in it.
Our plan will save people more than $100 a week compared to a commercial mortgage.
This programme will work alongside any government plan to build more affordable homes. It will provide access to affordable, stable housing and get people out of expensive rentals and into their own homes.
2) Working with community housing providers
Community and social housing providers, including iwi, have the skills and experience to play a big part in ending the housing crisis.Community housing providers will be able to purchase an additional 5,000 newly built, energy efficient homes from the government through the progressive ownership programme. Community housing providers may choose to use these as emergency housing, rent them out as social housing, or sell them to tenants over time using their own rent-to-buy programmes.
Community housing providers will provide a deposit or use private sector finance to pay for part of the initial cost of building new, highly energy efficient homes. The government will fund the remaining stake through Housing New Zealand. Community housing providers will make regular payments to buy out the government’s stake.
3) Innovative housing finance
Investors who want safe, socially responsible investment options can help fix the housing crisis.To enable the community housing sector to grow and help solve the housing crisis, the government will issue low-interest loans to community housing providers to build new, energy efficient homes. We’ll fund these by supplying long-term partially-guaranteed housing bonds to investors who want to see their money put to use to solve the housing crisis.
This will be in addition to existing community housing funding programmes.
…a 1000 homes a year for a decade? How the hell does that actually deal with the 41 000 homeless people we currently have? It’ll take at least half a century for the Greens to house the homeless under this policy, as long as no one else becomes homeless in the next 40 years that is.
Yawn.
Another swing and a miss from the Greens.
Yes correct Martyn,
We need a much more bold approach to catch up with the Wrecking ball of housing that is national today and the green policy is just a band aid on a deep 3rd degree burn isn’t’ it?
I’m assuming that each home will be able to house more than one person. 10,000 4person homes over a decade equals 40,000, plus 5000 community houses to help deal with the increase over that time.
I like the way this policy ensures that the houses will actually be occupied, as more houses does not necessarily equal less homelessness. The problem is that policies are going to have to be negotiated with probably Labour and NZF (provided voters wise up to NAct by next year). Community Housing with a focus energy efficiency might end up as a victim of short term economics.
Another policy that fails to impress. Yes it is better nothing but it isn’t enough to win voters. Where are the voting options for those of us who want our turn at saying FUCK YOU to the establishment?
The greens should just focuse in on what there good, if they took all this debt they want to create and shift it into sustainable jobs we wouldn’t have to expose some of our most vulnerable and UN educated to charlatans.
the Greens are away with the fairies at the bottom of the garden
….for a long time they refused to face the fact of foreign home buyers/foreign students in New Zealand buying up houses and creating scarcity and exorbitant prices (politically correct madness or ineptitude they called it “crude racial profiling” !)
…open immigration seems to have been a fetish for them …( internationalist globalist/neolibs?)…too bad about the natural environment and housing for young New Zealanders
My eyes glazed over reading it.
Personally think the Greens have some of the best policies. But they suffer from a lack of agency. Just putting some policy and speeches together does not really get people interested in Greens… Greens have never looked closer to the establishment than now, and just at the time when many people want the opposite.
Greens are better to get more active at protests, actually have policy that can be said in one sentence and be meaningful to someone and get out into the community and door knocking.
Read about IYI class. Greens are not IYI yet (unlike a lot of Labour MP’s) , but I’m worried about their extreme interest in Chloe and cycle lanes as saving the planet instead of real climate change and social policy.
In short Greens are very boring now. People love entertainment or real grass roots action. Not green teas, cokes and lattes in parliament.
Believe me, voters are not going to get out of bed to vote, with the Greens offerings as Lite as they are now.
How does the 1000 homes per year calculate with the 67,000 new migrants per year and 166,000 foreign students?
People are not fools. So there needs to be some sort of logical offering across the board.
absolutely TRUE EVERY WORD SAVE NZ,
I was a green when after returning to home country from Canada in 1998 when greens had real folks that shook-up the establishment as folks like Jeanette Fitzsimons and the legendary fighter Rod Donald and others including the beautiful Sue Kedgely they were very impressive but we have lost these statures now haven’t we all sadly.
We need to really search out new fols like this again as we see some now tying to express themselves and these opposition parties need to target them instead of moving goal posts as they now seem to be doing.
It you haven’t got it move aside as they say in Hollywood.
You two are very clever men
I’d like to see Greens do an advertising campaign (on line) with hall of fame with Jeanette and Kedgely so Greens still appear to enrapture the old Green ideology.
I don’t mind new ideas from the Greens but they really should understand how respected the previous Green MP’s were. Many of their supporters might be older people.
Just going for some sort of mockery of putting a pretty young women with zero green credentials in as an MP because she has a few followers in Auckland and knows social media, is not really the ethos of the Green values as many Green voters think of them.. in fact it could backfire and I would hate to see that happen…
Don’t put all the eggs in one blue Green basket.
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