Why the Housing crisis WON’T be part of the 2020 election

1. As long as New Zealanders think that a house is an investment rather than shelter and a necessity of life, little will change. On the same day last week a 23 year old was held up as an aspirational example in our media because he already owns 3 houses, while in the Netherlands a law passed putting an obligation to occupy on anyone buying a house or apartment. The young NZ man would be called a “huisjes melker” (house milker) in the Netherlands, and believe me that is not a term of endearment. A small German company has developed new building techniques using sustainable wood and is building 16 houses a day! Where are the NZ innovators in this field, we have plenty of resources! When do we learn to add some serious value to what we grow and produce?

   • “huisjes melker” (house milker)

     Good post.

     Unfortunately the neo liberal rats in NZ are not like the Europeans.

     Nor are we as blunt in calling the rats out as the Europeans.

     In fact we have modern neo liberalism in a civil and political rights backwaters. Its time we got militant. And showed these politicians who’s their boss and whose paying their wages.

     They shit and fart just like the rest of us yet happily take the generous salary’s we offer them and then proceed to dump that same shit on all of us.

     Its time they had the fear of God put right up them.

     I’d like them means tested.

     I’d like laws passed to curb their avarice and prevent them from using their position for pecuniary gain via international trade deals.

     They are there to serve US , – not feather their own nests at our expense.

     • BTW – rental housing in Sweden and The Netherlands is practically impossible to find.
       And having globalism is making it worse.

       Is the NZ answer of putting tenants into business accomodation aka 1 room hotel for $1500 p/w better for the tenant or the taxpayer than a 3 bedroom home at a fraction the price in a private rental?

       Kiwibuild promised more state houses and it can not keep up with demand.

       But while debate in NZ occurs for another decade, which has pretty much paralysed the left by their stupidity, what is happening to the growing amount of people who can’t find a rental?

       We heard from the Natz they would solve the rental and housing crisis.

       We heard from Col they would solve the rental and housing crisis.

       Well they both had their chance and it’s getting worse because the main issues of immigration and inflow of residents into NZ, are not being addressed for housing, and how the cost of building a house (even when the land is free aka state houses) is higher than the low wage economy we currently are encouraging with something like 60% of the work force on under $20 p/h.

       They are looking at the wrong factors and relying on business is not going to save them!

       20 years ago there were loads of cheap rentals in NZ, what has been the biggest change in 20 years?

     • We are/have become a playground for the rich or comfortably off, if you prefer.
       As in Greece.
       https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/25/spetses-greece-austerity-gulf

       Stick to your own square, this ‘line in the sand’ shows where you stop.
       https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/26/playgrounds-rich-kids-housing-social-apartheid

   • Damn right. I saw that little creep and wondered why on earth, given our housing problems, do the government not do something to stamp out the likes of that arsehole. But they don’t, they do nothing.

     And why the media think that is so good? Why do they think the homelessness caused by this sort of behaviour is acceptable?

2. So true Het Mes.
   I rent from some Kiwi Germans whose attitude to tennants is light years advanced compared to most NZers.

3. …and yet you continue to think, or at least say, that the Wage Slave Labour Party is somehow “of the left”, Wokester… what gives?

   • Got to keep reminding them of their ‘brand’ Castro – this NZ Inc is a business brand remember! Labour have gone upwards class-wise, and now feel a bit disdainful of the hoi polloi. That is why they have shifted to identity politics which allows them to be involved with people of the same great sensitivity as them. The fleet of foot amongst workers have become contractors or subbies and bear their own burdens of business ‘flexibility’.

     Labour is reluctant to get down and dirty with the rest. They may find their little comforts and lives snatched away when some snooty middle-class termagant decides that is appropriate. And even their children will be taken by these Rumpelstiltskin* if they deem their victims’ standards are unsuitable and beyond redemption. Now it is true that is the emotional response that many take in these situations, which is not always right and justified, because rationally sometimes the baby needs protection. But there is little effort from government to turn the tide and the lives of such people around – too much ordering from above and not enough support side by side with the result of self-satisfaction and rewards.

     *Rumpelstiltskin was all about power and greed. There is a triangle in the folk story; the greedy king, the miller looking for power and greasing up to the king, and the miller’s daughter who has to come up with the gold promised. http://rumpelstiltskincheyenneboyd.weebly.com/importance–themes.html
     A triangle situation is an interesting effect that people with problems can often experience.
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle

4. I know Labour want to pretend that housing is no longer an issue. I know they want to concentrate on being government whatever that means to them but housing is a giant growing problem that just cannot be pretended away. It can’t be Instagrammed away, it can’t be smile and waved away. It can’t be unicorned and rainbowed away. It can’t be pretend cared away. And most of all it cannot be dealt with using the failed and lying methods of housing subsidies and motel units to bandaid over the infected wound it is.

   Reality is Labour got many of its votes from those hoping beyond hope that the hyperbole they talked after 9 years in opposition wasn’t just that. That they cared enough to be “transformative” and to take a new approach to sort this mess out. But it was all piss and wind.

   First, out of the breech with all the potential of a big old World War One shell was the dud, Phil Twyford. But he hit the ground with a thud, then silence and never went off. Failure is imprinted on that mans forehead. But he lingered for the better part of two years not delivering with the PM smiling and watching on. Then came Megan Woods, who has vanished off the face of this earth since her media extravaganza sometime mid last year when she announced Kiwibuild was more or less dead, offering market-led failed alternatives like lower deposits and consuming all of your retirement savings (as if many people have any) as her answer.

   Fact is to fix this mess, leave the banks out of it because they are the ultimate winners and ultimate cause of the mess that is growing on a daily basis and it is international. Stop housing being a tradeable currency. Stop it being a get rich quick scheme for those horrible little creatures called “investors”. No loan can be obtained off the back of any other debt to fund a second house. End of story. Hard proof is required of the source of the money used to purchase a home, not some dubious loan from any source, not money from somewhere else in the world. Holding more than one property to reside in should be made financially ruinous! Think about that government MP’s of that ilk and you know exactly who you are!

   Its an emergency so create a Ministry of Works that obtains labour and skills from around the world and internally and construct mass social housing, but not the kind that attracts ferals and you know the kind, the kind of shit that work effortlessly to destroy their own lives and everyone around them simply through their dysfunctional lifestyles and in doing so create situations all too common that make good people want to desperately give up and want out because of them but the kind that ordinary good people who try to get on in this world and with others that can rent and look after the place and maybe even buy one day and do not stop building them.

   As it stands this January day in 2020 I do not see this from Labour or the Greens or from any party currently in parliament. But what is for sure is this problem is growing and the economy of the people is being destroyed thanks to it and lives with it. It cannot be ignored, it simply will not be ignored. And to repeat topping up rent subsidies and paying out massive amounts of money to moteliers is only exacerbating the problem, you morons.

   So please Labour, sort your shit out, cut the photo op’s, cut the bullshit social media charm offensives and honour your promises and think of New Zealanders, not bank CEO’s and their shareholders. That’s if you have any sort of morals left and want to look at yourselves in the mirror with anything other than pure contempt!

5. If we have 230,000 unskilled new residents to add competition to the working poor, the 4,000,000 tourists and 60,000 new residents per year, can’t see the 50,000 state housing lasting long.

   Even at 4 to a house we need 72,500 new houses per year just for the new residents coming into NZ “to help our economy” one Burger King, Thirsty Liquor or Yili group at a time… (or are we encouraging 10 to a house now?)

   “While resident numbers fell, temporary work visas were on the rise, up 4000 to more than 230,000.”
   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/380134/sharp-drop-in-skilled-immigrants-employers-need-these-people

   The obvious question of why NZ can’t keep skilled people who actually were born here and create high paid jobs and businesses in NZ that are taxed in NZ (not cleaning/cafe business as a front for criminal activity), or arrive here and are really in demand worldwide like Alejandro Jimenez http://werewolf.co.nz/2014/12/public-health-the-silent-crisis/ is a question not asked by government.

   Nor any interest in the cause effect on demand of affordable housing, by the obsession with a low wage economy and poor employment conditions, or reliance of sunset polluting industries, that is growing.

   The skilled category is laughable with chefs, retail managers and cafe or restaurant managers making the main migrants into NZ… essential skills migrants are chef, dairy cattle farm worker, Cafe or Restaurant Manager, Retail Manager (General), Aged or Disabled Carer…

   The laughably called ‘skilled’ jobs have in common is that they are not really skilled or it’s very open to interpretation. They are poorly paid and likely to result in permanent wage and accomodation top ups from existing tax payers once they get residency. All these people need accomodation and probably can’t afford to pay much, just like the locals, adding to the intense competition for rentals and state housing.

   https://croakingcassandra.com/2018/08/30/work-visas-for-shop-managers/

   Note he majority of people moving to New Zealand on a PLT basis fall into the ‘not applicable’ occupational categories. On average, these migrants have numbered 9,830 per year over the last 15 years. This group includes children, spouses, and retirees, the majority of whom are not in the workforce.

   10% of migrants coming to NZ are aged parents, which makes the aged carer shortage category even more laughable because NZ is importing in aged migrant parents and then saying we have a skills shortage for aged carers and importing in more low waged aged carers! I wonder why the government now has to borrow billions to keep the Ponzi afloat as too gutless to work out what is going on!

   Likewise link between cafe, import/export and cleaning businesses and criminal activity. Has the penny dropped to police, IRD and immigration, probably not!

6. A friend got married last year and moved into his wife’s house. He decided to rent his own place out for a while until he was ready to sell. The rest of the story is a disaster. To cut a long story short, his first tenant cost him $30,000 in repairs to bring it back up to a salable condition. Being a landlord is not for the faint of heart! I certainly wouldn’t want to be a landlord because your expensive asset is in the hands of people who are essentially an unknown quantity, until it’s too late.

   So let’s review how we go to this point in the so-called ‘housing crisis’.

   Councils in Auckland and Wellington have for decades operated highly restrictive versions of the RMA, making house building risky and unprofitable. This restriction in supply has had obvious consequences in the housing market. My own house went up more in value in the Clark era than in the Key era, so this is not a new phenomenon. This problem continues to this day.
   After the GFC thousands of kiwis came home from the UK, US and Aussie, often with a fat wad of cash in their back pockets and immediately bought a house in Auckland. In addition to that a lot of black money was coming out of China looking for a place to hide. These two factors took up all the available housing stock.
   The next pinch is in the rental market. Three factors are at play here:
   Firstly many mum & dad landlords have passed age 65 and are selling down to fund their retirements. This was always their plan. In most cases these renters are being bought by first time homeowners taking advantage of low interest rates plus maybe a bit of help with the deposit from parents. This is great news for new home buyers but it is a net loss of rental stock and is obviously forcing up rents.
   Secondly we have the current government’s ideological attack on landlords. Mandating heat pumps and insulation means these costs are just passed on to the tenant: They have to be to make the rental market work.
   Lastly, most of the real profit for landlords has been in the capital gain over time. The rents have just helped service the mortgage. A government threatening to clamp down on capital gains has frightened a lot of people out of the business.
   The net result is a spike in rents, and it’s far from over yet.

7. There’s a really frightening aspect of the housing crisis that no one outside the building industry seems to have noticed: The cost of building in NZ has gone from $1000 per sq. metre in 2000 to a rate this year that seems to be around $3000 per sq metre. This means that the cost to build a house is about the same as a cost of buying a house.

   Let that sink in for a bit…

   This combined with the shortage of housing means the chance of us getting back to the 1:3 ratio of house to yearly salary are pretty small. It also suggests that the problem may be less that the cost of housing has gone up and more that our wages have gone down in real terms. This further implies that official inflation rate over the last 20 years is massively incorrect.

   Some suggest a duopoly in building supplies is the cause of the problem in NZ while I also wonder if the flow-on effects of peak oil are behind it.

   Probably it’s a combination of all of the above but my big question is why is no one talking about this?

   • Cheap labour ain’t that cheap… because when things go wrong it costs more to rectify poor work than it would be to just employ qualified people and cherish them and pay them well… last time I looked there were many plumbing jobs with laughable amounts of pay like $20 – $30 p/h and then the charge out to clients is $70 – $100+++ then travel and then huge mark ups of materials.

     It’s a scam to mark up unskilled people’s wages by getting the lowest paid in, and then charging them out at top dollar professional rates. This then goes into undercutting more skilled operators to get cheap contracts. However while the under cutters in neoliberal style, are often not able to fulfil the work in many cases or have any quality of people! Aka NZ bus style !

     Happening all over NZ from transport to construction even IT rates have scarcely moved apart from Chorus rates which have plummeted that type of work for the labour…. it’s a race to the bottom, which surprise surprise is not very efficient, hence the prices keep rising while the wages keep going down along with skilled people leaving, and contributing to construction businesses that have been going for decades… now in liquidation.

     The NZ obsession and experiment with one of the highest migration rates in the world, has led to our productivity dropping worldwide… and now homelessness becoming more common.

8. This article makes a lot of sense . Habitat for humanity have a format they have successfully used over the years to get hundreds into home ownership. All they lack is the resources to build the homes . The biggest hurdle is building them in the right place not just where some burocrat thinks would be a good idea. In Chch some one thought it would be a good idea to get people to live in the city so Fletchers built 175 apartments many of which have sat empty for over a year and many of those sold have gone on airb and b.

   • Habitat for humanity have a format they have successfully used over the years to get hundreds into home ownership.

     Here’s their main link: https://habitat.org.nz/
     Their ‘Need in NZ’ page: the-need-in-new-zealand/ …where “the high cost of housing keeps families in a cycle of poverty.

9. If the housing crisis will not be part of the 2020 election we only have our bias, discriminative and racist media to blame for not doing there job. After all they allowed national to get away with saying no housing crisis for 9 years in the meantime they were going on overseas trips with john.

10. The four foreign owned banks are our enemy.
    The BNZ. ANZ. ASB. Westpac.
    There’s no counter argument.
    Everything financial goes through their digestive tracts.
    Everything dysfunctional that we must either endure or succumb to through no other choice is as a result of that which is then shat out their arse holes down onto us.
    When OUR politicians side with the four foreign banks then those politicians are our enemy too.
    Our ludicrous house prices are as good an example of our politicians siding with the four foreign banks and our politicians watch on impassively as the four foreign banks took $5 billion dollars in net profit out of our country last financial year while we watch on having been brainwashed into thinking we’re powerless to stop them while we must walk past the wretched homeless in their dreadful discomfort.
    And if you look around for someone to blame? Hold up a mirror and look at yourselves. There! That’s who to blame.
    We’re mindlessly allowing our own politicians to hold the door open to the parasitic predators who are the foreign banksters who are in partnership with those whom can greedily make a profit from the misery of others. Basically, by keeping us cash poor then pimping us out to the above four banksters.
    Now you know. So, what are you going to do about it?
    I’d suggest we get our politicians by the scruff of the neck and demand that they DO THE FUCKING JOBS WE PAY THEM TO DO! And that’s not to look pink and clean and white toothed while knowing there are poor people rotting in the gutters just outside their air con’d offices. That’s grimly fucked. I mean, that, is really, really fucked.

11. This is a link I was trying to find earlier.
    Boingboing.net
    “Banks have returned to the pre-2008 world of automatic credit-limit increases for credit cards used by already indebted people.” ( Guess who got them into debt in the first place…? )
    Calling bankster’s scum would be to deeply discredit actual scum. So, apol’s actual scum.

    https://boingboing.net/2020/01/26/pclis.html

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