KiwiBuild part of the problem, not the solution – AAAP
The Labour-led Government ran a PR stunt today to celebrate the first few families that would move into the first 18 KiwiBuild homes. While the Government prioritises its flagship home-ownershp scheme, tens of thousands of people continue to be homeless in Aotearoa, with no hope of being able to ever afford living in one of these Kiwibuild homes. Auckland Action Against Poverty warns that the focus on building so called affordable private housing, subject to market speculation, will further exacerbate the housing crisis, instead of fixing it.
“KiwiBuild homes are out of reach for the working poor and the unemployed, who are the ones facing the real brunt of the housing crisis. With a price-tag of half a million dollars, KiwiBuild homes are a future speculator’s dream”, says Ricardo Menendez March, Auckland Action Against Poverty’s Coordinator.
“We echo the concerns of Monte Cecilia Housing Trust’s Bernie Smith, who calledKiwiBuild a ‘community trainwreck’. Displacing thousands of public housing tenants in order to build private housing in public land is a form of partial privatisation of public land, and will cause distress for the tenants evicted.
“The planned net increase to the social housing stock will only be marginal. In South Auckland, the Government is planning to build 10,000 new homes, 3,000 being state homes, which will be built after demolishing 2,700. This means that altogether only a few hundred additional state homes will be available for our fast growing homeless population.
“The Government needs to recalibrate its priorities and instead focus on building far more permanent social housing than it is currently planning. For that to happen, Housing New Zealand needs to be properly resourced and public land needs to be used to house people in public housing, not unaffordable private houses.
“In a few years time we’ll have state led gentrification, with middle and high income earners being able to access some of the KiwiBuild homes while those at the bottom continue to struggle with fast rising rents and lack of social housing.
“We are calling on the Labour Government to get its priorities right and focus on the creation of social housing, instead of entrenching housing unaffordability”.
It’s basically a selloff of public land isn’t it! With a little property development thrown in. Roll on neoliberal privatisation of public assets.
D J S
20% of the people are against everything all the time!
yes they need to stop building houses for the middle classes on our state land and start building more for lower income , the poor and homeless people I see in Pomare on the corner of of High street and Taita drive 590k houses on state housing now to be fair this was national that sold this land toa kiwi developer and this is not fair or right we had to live in dumps now they have 500k houses on this land, racist, discriminative pricks ( HNZ & our previous governments HNZ workers)
100% Michelle.
The planned out come was not what tenants and others were told when the houses where emptied.
Private development is a den of corruption breeching public and social good as well as environmental stability.
New Zealand must be able to sustain 3% growth sustainably if we are to get back to low unemployment. And it’s a matter of shame that after 9 years of National the best they could do with capital stock was to sell out State Housing and New Zealand could only grow with the demands spilling into imports, and only 1.5% and 3% spilling into the domestic economy on a good day while countries to the north in Asia are doing sixes and sevens and eights. The best National could do after banging around for 40 years is 1.5% growth peaking at 3% in overdrive.
What I’m saying is the notion that any one should set the economy on fire with unemployment at 4.9% while youth unemployment is closer to 10% with no notions of an economy. And the same stupid wilfulness that the Leader of the opposition Simon Bridges talks about so that we are sitting on 1.5% growth rates so that we are not seeing a rapid decline in unemployment, that is an unacceptable policy.
In New Zealand The Reserve Bank has a policy of full employment and price stability and the Government has similar commitments to full employment and price stability and the only way we will get it is not by employing people to take flamethrowers to the economy as National wishes to do by supposedly having an independence between the reserve bank, the legislature and the community, but by putting the capital stock in place to grow the economy at 3%+.