Owning your own home was the foundation of the “Kiwi dream”. Now it seems that we’ve let that dream slip further out of reach than almost anywhere in the world. Houses in Auckland are less affordable than in New York. Demand in the rental market is far outstripping supply. What should the government be doing?
Overcrowding is a big problem that drives disease and prevents kids getting the best start in life. Normally, I would say that the solution to overcrowding is more state housing – eco-smart housing, which would also create jobs. But an interesting article in the Guardian recently by George Monbiot suggests another solution.
No, this post isn’t about Smile and Wave’s failure to close the gap with Australia. It’s about the widening gap between the tiny elite in this country and the rest of us. Even before the Great Recession, 10% controlled more wealth than the rest of us combined. The housing market shows that their wealth is still rising while ours falls.
Three government investment decisions in the last couple of weeks have shown the deficiencies in the neoliberal way of doing things. SOE Solid Energy’s lignite-to-liquids obsession, Kiwirail buying trains in China rather than making them itself and Steven Joyce decision to re-create Telecom’s monopoly by giving it 70-84% of the broadband contracts.
The sum Phil Heatley has so far spent trying to get three women and their families evicted from their state houses, an effort to look tough, is the equivalent to the cost of building two new state houses. Over half a million spent on an ultimately pointless exercise – one that’s far from finished.
House prices are a good indication of how the economy is going. They rose rapidly in the 2000s, stalled in 2007, plummeted in 2008, and made a slight recovery in 2009. Now they’re heading down again. The median house price is over 16% below the peak in late 2007 and I reckon they’ve got a long down way to go yet.
Matt McCarten and his team took over a vacant state house in Mana to install a young couple who were previously living in a garage. Four supporters were soon arrested. The media are calling this action a “stunt”. To do so is to diminish the significance of the issue to which it was drawing attention. Call it a protest. People are living in squalor while state houses sit empty. Why?
It’s not surprising that the Housing Shareholders Advisory Group came to the conclusions it did. Despite its name, the group included no state house tenants. It was a group packed with private social housing providers, hand-picked to deliver the conclusion that these groups should be given control of state houses.
On Thursday, our new dictator Gerry Brownlee decreed by Order in Council that the following Acts of Parliament were amended: the Building Act, the Local Government Act, the Resource Management Act, various pieces of transport legislation, and the Civil Defence Act. Most of the changes deal with minutiae of government. Some are less innocuous.
In today’s, Sunday-Star Times, Rob Stock picks up on a topic I’ve been writing about: “THE EARTHQUAKE has exposed a policy that must be changed immediately – the way the Earthquake Commission is funded.Significant numbers of people will get nothing from the commission because it is funded by a levy on house insurance.”
The Government has announced it intends to push through emergency legislation to expedite the rebuilding of Christchurch. The urge to put things back the way they were is only natural in the wake of a huge physical and psychic shock but shouldn’t we have a think about how we want Christchurch rebuilt before we let anyone go ahead willy-nilly?
The Napier Earthquake led to the earthquake-resistant building standards that have proven so valuable in Christchurch. The EQC was founded after the Wairarapa Earthquake. World War 2 and the threat of air raids led to the creation of Civil Defence. What lessons can we learn from the Christchurch Earthquake? Better standards building on around liquefaction-prone ground seems like a priority.
20,000 more Kiwis’ jobs are at risk as commercial building construction grinds to a halt. The Greens have a plan to divert money from low-quality spending on motorways to high benefit to cost spending on housing that will save those jobs and give Kiwi families a better standard of living. That’s the kind of visionary economic leadership we need. We’re not going to get it from National.
In the last seven days a triple-conjunction of political portents has publicly demonstrated just how bankrupt of imagination and policy this current government truly is. The lack of direction and paucity of creative ideas is breath-taking. A “caretaker-government” would be a polite euphemism in this context.
Phil Heatley says he fears for the future of state housing. I can’t help but agree, but the problem is that it is Heatley and his government that are making the future of state housing so dire. They have cancelled investment in new state houses and declared the existing stock for sale. Now, Heatley has to cheek to say the charitable sector will have to step in where his government is failing.
The country is short about 10,000 houses and many of the houses we do have (mostly privately owned rentals) are unhealthy. The housing shortage was a driver of the last housing boom and is still keeping house prices excessively high, while poor quality housing means higher health costs, more sick days, and kids that are sick so often it disrupts their education. It would be sensible on every level to build the extra houses we need, and the government should take the lead role.
Stuff reports that under Minister Phil Heatley, Housing NZ will manage additions of only 275 houses for each of the next two years. […]
According to a new report: “New Zealand is a great place for children if their parents have a good income, live in a warm dry house and are well educated.” However if you’re not born into a privileged household, then death and disease “is worse than that of all but two [developed] countries, Mexico and Turkey.”
While it rains, thousands of homes are rotting, a legacy of the stupid deregulation of the building industry by National in the 1990s. The current government is proposing that huge costs be passed on to ratepayers, and tonight Wellington City Council votes on the plan. There are no good solutions to this mess.
There are several myths about the coming tax swap that have a surprising amount of currency. The biggest is that this tax swap will boost growth. It won’t and the Tax Working Group never said it would. What it will do is increase inequality with massive tax cuts for the elite funded by higher GST and rents for working Kiwis. That’s not by accident or inevitable – it’s by design.
The tax changes that will soon be announced are characterised even by the Government as a ‘tax swap’. They are fiscally neutral. The tax burden will not fall. All that will change is who it will fall on. Most people end up neutral or slightly worse off from the GST and income tax changes. The rich get huge cuts, which renters will end up paying for. Who are the renters? The census tells us.
How dumb was John Carter to use his speech at the Grey Power National Conference to have a cry because Grey Power’s participating in an inquiry into aged care by Labour, the Greens, and the Progressives? You don’t try to bully Grey Power with its 100,000 members. The grey voters will be leaving National in droves.
It’s time for the National Party to issue an abject apology to the nation… for the 1992 Building Regulations that directly led to […]
As Marty G has pointed out Bill English is looking into killing the tax advantages for investing in housing. Good. But it’s not […]
The other day on Red Alert, Chris Hipkins related an interesting story about how National’s last round of State House sales went awry: […]
National has announced that it will begin offering to sell 3,800 state houses to tenants living in them on market rents. I don’t […]
I am heartened that Phil Goff is trying to work with the Government to address over-investment in residential property. However, I think a […]
Remember the iconic photos of the first Labour Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage and his cabinet celebrating the introduction of State Housing by […]
As I alluded to yesterday, the claims from John Key that he has slashed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the cost of […]
And by any other name it smells as bad. John Key has annouced a reform of the rules for ministerial accommodation allowance. A […]
Why are house prices rising at the same time as mortgagee sales are hitting record highs? More people than ever are unable to […]
The real estate agencies and the newspapers, both of which have an interest in a booming property market, are predicting that housing prices will surge […]
It’s a rare day that I agree with Bill English but he’s right about the danger of another housing boom. The last bubble […]
One of these things is not like the other One of these things is not quite the same. Can you guess which one […]
Exiled Online, a US site, has excellent coverage of the recession and the sub-prime crisis from a ground-level view. Yasha Levine moved to […]
There’s a lot of empty, over-optimistic talk around at the moment about ‘green-shoots’ in the economy. Supposedly, these are little early signs of […]
