Chlöe Swarbrick: We need more homes, but where?
We need more homes, we all despairingly say. But where?
This week Parliament will be debating a law change with the intention of increasing housing supply and improving affordability. It seeks to do this primarily by allowing developments of up to three stories across residential zones in our largest cities, without the need for resource consent.
Houses aren’t going to fall out of the sky – if they did, we wouldn’t have to deal with the building materials shortages, let alone housing shortages and the time crunch to build them – and there’s still really important arguments to be had about whether this will impact affordability when neither of the larger parties in Parliament are willing to say they want house prices to drop.
Home ownership crisis requires radical solutions not bipartisan virtue signals!
Labour and National unite to help solve housing crisis by forcing councils to build up
Labour and National have united to help solve the housing crisis by forcing councils to build up in urban areas and allow more subdivisions.
In an unprecedented joint press conference on Tuesday, Housing Minister Megan Woods and Environment Minister David Parker were joined by National leader Judith Collins and housing spokesperson Nicola Willis at the Beehive podium.
It concerns the Government’s National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD) released in 2020, which is yet to come into effect. It directs councils to make room for growth both ‘up’ and ‘out’ to help solve the housing crisis.
…great but no where near what the crisis of home ownership now requires.
We require new law cementing in long term tenancies with rent controls and the promotion of ‘ethical landlords’, people who refuse to squeeze every last drop of money out of their tenants for needless greed.
Our social inequality demands solutions. Renters rights, affordable housing and a realisation on behalf of those Generations thrown under the User Pays Bus that agitation is all they have left as hope, is part of that solution.
Use the Public Works Act to seize 90% of all golf courses in Auckland.
The Housing crisis needs an immediate solution, not more empty promises.
Using the Public Works Act, central Government should seize 90% of golf courses in Auckland and build a mix of state houses and first time home buyer owner/occupier tiny houses using the best environmental & urban design housing.
Fuck the golfers.
We could solve homelessness, provide extra resources to these new communities while giving first home buyers an immediate way into the housing market.
Why not turn golfing privilege into economic justice?
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We need green spaces in all big cities . Golf courses provides this space along with an oppetunity for sport and a mental break for many of all ages and gender .
Agree. Would be better to open them up in timeshare arrangement for ordinary people to walk through and families to picnic in.
They don’t provide ‘an opportunity for sport and a mental break for people of all ages and gender’, they provide a closed elitist area where well off people can gather to hit a little ball around green and pristine countryside, maintained by other people who can’t afford to play the game and would be considered for membership of the club if they could afford it. Release the wasted land to build homes for the poor people who are crying out for a safe warm place to live.
Agree Trev, Green space is valuable for esthetics and carbon sinks in cities, besides not that big after roads and sections carved up. I’m not pro golf, never played never will but I understand the right of golfing in the community. It seems a no brainer that farms on city boundaries should be brought and developed for housing.
We have way too many farms. All the whinging about infrastructure cost? Just fucking do it!
We just spent 50 Billion saving businesses from Covid, funny how that money was found FFS.
Maybe it will satiate Martyn’s golf hate if golf courses are removed but the green spaces are retained as reserves, we have few enough urban green zones left as it is.
Public golf courses are open to the public. You do not need to be a member of the club to kick a ball around or have a picnic on the grass. People don’t seem to understand this.
So you ignore the fact that the government has the power to do what they want as long as there is a crisis that requires drastic action.. No surprises there… The fact is that NZ’s lack of housing, and the obscene costs of renting a place. assuming one can get into an even half decent living arrangement that doesn’t use up over half their income at best, IS a crisis situation.. As one who has spent over half his adult life overseas, I can state without fear of contradiction, that NZ has the highest rents in relation to economic activity of any country I’ve ever been in… The only reason I come back here is because I still have family here, and the only reason I’m still here now is that I am trapped here for the next year or so at least, but after that, I’m off to where I can make a living, and live in a civilised manner without having to go hungry to maintain that… NZ, and Auckland specifically has been munted, and that was the reality by 2012 at the latest… And it was your hero the American PM that deliberately created that paradigm, so try at least, to make the attempt to say stuff that has a basis in reality.. That is, if you have the brains/maturity to attempt it..
Eden Park!
20 story high rises of tasteful social housing in park like grounds.
Same again in Epsom.
Same again in Remuera.
Same again in Kelburn.
Just to remind those who think get rich policies are fine or problems affecting society ignored by those who could bring change, do actually harm others!
Golf in New Zealand is not an elite sport reserved for those of privilege. Sure you can pay a fortune to play at some exclusive courses but on the whole it is accessible to a wide range of incomes, and played by the very young through to the very senior. Its also multicultural. The quickest way to turn golf into an elite sport in Auckland is to get rid of 90% of the courses.
I can think of a number of courses/clubs in Auckland that sold off land or disappeared altogether to make way for housing already. As Frank points out courses are well utilized now (and not by bloody Lord Farquaad and other landed gentry)
If you had to pick on spaces set aside for leisure in Auckland why not focus on racecourses. They promote gambling, flog horses, have horses put down at the hint of a leg break/fracture, and by all account struggle to garner regular audiences.
Personally I would be way more in favour of rent controls, and why not look at restricting ownership in terms of quantity of dwellings in certain zones (pretty much all of Auckland). There is no point in building more and more houses if the same mega landlords keep buying them.
While I am not a fan of golf your answer makes the most sense & as you say the horse racing industry is a parasitic endeavor that relies on money from other industries to prop up the money go around that mainly benefits a few in the horse industry.
Couldn’t agree more. The course I play at is predominantly Pasifica and more lower social economic players (i.e. it’s a public course rather than a private club).
Golf in NZ is not the elite past time that Martyn seems to think it is.
Golf isn’t quite as elitist in NZ as it is in, say the USA…. traditionally it’s been within the economic reach of a skilled working class person such as a crane operator or car mechanic…. and I doubt this creative suggestion would actually solve the housing crisis…. but yeah it’s an incredibly wasteful and enviornmentally destructive use of land, so fuck the golfers.
Fuck Devonport naval base off to Whangarei to and use that.
I can’t see the residents in Devonport reacting well to that, low income housing? In Devonport? Oh no darling, that will not do….
So we fully opened the door for immigration and investment during the Key regime. Everyone settled and everyone bought in Auckland and there was no plan to distribute this new population of immigrants. Now there’s a housing crisis in Auckland (with approximately 40,000 empty ‘investment’ houses- remember when houses were being bought via the phone with foreign bank loans!) and you are pushing to sell the ever-decreasing green belts just for shonky developers to build poor quality (the future housing ‘crisis’) terraced housing? Auckland will go from housing crisis to shithole with pockets of ghetto’s everywhere. Encourage industry/jobs in other parts of the country- should have happened decades ago but along with neoliberalism came ‘monetary policy’- and nothing else.
Great comment, bang on.
Shhh, don’t mention the Key years, I’m Right will go into spasm even though you are 150 % correct.
This government needs it arse firmly kicking.
In January 21, on one of those rare occasions when Jacinda was forced to think about the housing crisis by the media, she said she thought house prices were unsustainable. That was an abysmal response. They have since risen a massive 22.7%. Jacinda now says she still thinks they’re unsustainable! Is she taking the piss or is her thought processes so devoid of intelligence that she thinks that is an acceptable answer?
But it gets worse. Her sum total planning and strategy of this crisis during her tenure as leader of this country is… she “hopes that may change”. Oh. My. God. How fucking useless can you get? That is our Prime Minister folks!
This is the calibre of thinking from our elected government, whimsical vacant musing and hoping that, I don’t know, a unicorn will come along with maybe a rainbow and fairy dust and it will all be better.
Crisis come catastrophe equals an emergency that requires such a response and yet we get “I hope”, along with super fine tune tinkering. Labour and National both are so delusional that they want sustained moderate price growth to continue even though prices are so far into the stratosphere they cannot be reached for decades now by many.
I cannot vote for uncaring idiots like our current government.
XRAY,
Well said. We accept the PM is a very intelligent person and she’s an empathetic human being who cares deeply for people so WTAF is going on here?
The PM walks a tight rope on housing and is stuck in a paradox. She wants to please everyone but all she’s done is promote diabolical inequity in housing. The most tragic aspect of this situation is that’s she provided ongoing conclusive evidence she does not intend changing the status quo. She wants to change the housing dynamic but doesn’t. What a hopeless farce. She knows that if house prices drop as a result of her policies there will be howls of protest. Families would see their home in a negative equity situation. Investors would wage war on her again as they did when the Capital Gains Tax was on the table and the elderly would see their retirement plan evaporating. Her answer to this quandary is make fluffy noises and “tinker” around the edges. No MP’s want house prices to drop. “Stabilizing” house prices is the Ardern goal but the reality of that amounts to retaining the current status quo of diabolical housing inequality.
The housing crisis is way too far gone for “tinkering” around the edges. Ardern has become the master of making fluffy noises and producing very little. In this case, that is the undoubted aim.
The Ardern Government had one shot at reigning in the out of control housing market. The Capital Gains Tax. Tragically, Ardern put self interest ahead of what needed to happen. Property investors waged a highly funded scaremongering misinformation campaign and this frightened Ardern. It was the first open dissent displayed against her Government and it took it’s toll on both her and Winston Peters who not long after threatened to bring the Government to it’s knees if it continued to pursue the CGT. Ardern was so concerned she went all out to not only dump the proposed CGT but she wanted to appease Peters by erasing it from ever being on the table again. “The CGT is gone and as long as I’m the PM, it will never reappear”. There were two notable short term winners at that moment. Ardern who was able to breathe again and retain power. The other winners were property investors who could continue to enjoy their obscene profits at the expense of kiwi families whose hopeless fate in the housing market had just been sealed by none other than the very person selling herself as their caring savior.
The longer Ardern remains the PM, the more respect I lose for her. The proof of her pudding does not reflect well. The cake looks pretty but the ingredients are wrong and it’s distasteful. This epitomizes the Ardern Government more every month. Her only saving grace at this time is the state of the current National Party.
‘The longer Ardern remains the PM, the more respect I lose for her. ‘=me too!
Another great comment from Thinking Man.
The Second act of cowardice from JA was ending Covid Elimination.
‘The longer Ardern remains the PM, the more respect I lose for her’, yep me too.
But the alternatives are just hideous. Going forward…..just more shit.
Sadly I agree with you Thinking-Man. Being kind doesn’t excuse her for being a wimp.
She just might come up with a land tax or even a financial transaction tax or even both, but there again, being a wimp, she won’t . Last hope is that ,being totally poll driven, they might panic and actually come up with something? Nah, they haven’t got it in them. Bloody Neolibs through and through.
Is she taking the piss or is her thought processes so devoid of intelligence that she thinks that is an acceptable answer?
Why can’t it be both?
The only time the Housing shortage was fixed was in the 1920’s when the government took hold of the problem. It built a plant in Hamilton, at the railway yard that made kit-set housing. Using the railway. Houses were delivered up and down the country. The only reason it stopped was that the private construction companies complained that they could not compete and were closing down…one of them was from a James Fletchers ltd. The Government closed the plant…the housing issue was back, and here we are…The Government, can modify the model from 1920’s to todays context and fix the problem figuratively overnight…if it wanted to.
Yup, remember them days when Beazley Homes were supplying and building a lot of state houses which were also rail freighted straight from the yard at the Mount. Sadly it was sold off to Fletchers and has morped into Placemakers.
We need more homes!
Is that true? Perhaps we need to look at the other side of the equation. Where has all this demand for housing come from, because there seems to be HUGE focus on supply side issues and not a peep about the other curve on the ol classic supply and demand graph.
Debt & QE fuelled asset inflation, massive immigration, foreign students, migrant workers, 1600000 new residents at the stroke of a pen.
Paper millionaires everywhere, votes galore.
Those calling for the removal of democratically formulated guides around our built environment are being foolish – these schemes for building up are a Trojan horse for more of same, only at a greater intensity, with bigger scope for windfall profit by privatising the commons – that is the amenity of our existing neighbourhoods is up for grabs, first in, best dressed.
I agree.
The most obvious solution yet our leaders never seem to talk about it.
I would go further and lessen demand by getting rid of newer immigrants wouldn’t that bring down house prices with a surplus of housing?
Notably, many have become developers, many cater specifically to that market.
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