A few things I will be heading to over the coming 5 days in Auckland. A documentary on climate change on pacific islands. Phil Goff on foreign affairs. And the Inaugural Keith Locke Memorial Debate. Moot is “China is a threat to regional peace”. I kind of got caught up in each of these for one reason or another…
As property investors indicate an intention to raise rents, Renters United and 20+ community groups call for a rent freeze in Auckland.
Heavy rain has caused severe flooding in Auckland, leading to evacuations, power outages, and high risk warnings of sewerage on beaches.
People are being urged to stay home if safe, and stay off the roads. Please also check on neighbours and people who may be struggling especially disabled people, elderly, those on their own, and those with young children and pets.
Waking up this morning was a bit of an eerie feeling. The alarm went off as usual at 0700 (and the 0880 one just clicked over). Very little traffic noise. The quiet sound of the workstation and server fans was louder than the the remaining white noise from the traffic.
This post is here for you to share your first day under lock-down.
Stuff has an article up about last years local body elections in Auckland. As usual the interesting parts are at the end. But I have to reiterate – online voting isn’t the answer. As a programmer, I’d just call it stupid and dangerous.
The rate at which the building consents have increased in Auckland, and the shift to a more useful mix, has been incredibly fast. You can understand why National after their decade of failure for housing and transport have been targeting the authors of that success. It highlights National’s economic incompetence.
Politik reports that some mayors from Northalnd are upset that they aren’t going to get a four lane boondoggle to feed more heavy trucks into traffic chaos that is the Auckland isthmus. They can stick their trucks up their body cavity of choice and learn to love rail. We don’t need more traffic in Auckland until we fix the disaster that National have left us.
This isn’t what we meant by keep it in the ground.
One of the dafter myths about the current burgeoning immigration industry is that we need skilled immigrants for the construction industry. As usual the talkback idiots are wrong. We don’t get many. We need more. We need to get rid of the migrant dross to get them. A Kiwibuild quota is a good idea.
Ben Ross at The Spinoff “The government’s continued support of the road freight industry in preference to expanding the role of rail, in the face of the data in this report, makes a complete mockery of its claim to prudent economic management. It makes, instead, a pretty good case for incompetence, or cronyism, or both.”
Modern Day Land Grab or Treaty Settlement?
The same study that trumpeted Wellington as the most liveable city in the world, has Auckland as the 3rd most expensive for Public Transport, behind London and Dublin.
You’d have to say that an Easter cyclone is one of those truly awful scenarios for Auckland. Forget the water. What happens when the Harbour Bridge and the Airport probably close? It is going to be a hell of an Easter on the roads and travelling. More extreme weather brought to you from climate change.
That is the Nats’ advice to aspiring Auckland house buyers.
The typhoid outbreak in Auckland is very bad news. Now would also be a good time to reflect on NZ’s generally poor record on child poverty and disease.
Warnings on the state of the Auckland housing market are coming thick and fast now. People who bought recently (at the peak of prices and low interest rates) are likely to get burned.
It’s too hard! We’ll do it later! Auckland airport rail is just the latest example.
There are no surpluses in NZ right now, not in any real sense. There is only debt, negative externalities and deferred costs.
The effects of climate change are here, now, playing out in the flooded north. We should be preparing, we should be hardening critical infrastructure like Auckland’s fresh water supply. Instead of building – you know – more roads.
If Auckland as a city wish to retain representative samples of our past, then we should concentrate on how to preserve those rather than trying to deny the migration that increases its population by something like 50 thousand people per year. This is a working city – not a museum.
Already sky-high Auckland rents are set to rise further.
Could be that the Auckland property market is turning downwards.
Bill English and Paula Bennett won’t be thinking about it this week, but Auckland’s Housing Crisis continues to get worse.
The first big debate in the Auckland mayoralty race starts at 8am today. Links in the post.
Voting closes on October 8. Phil Goff wins the mayoralty shortly afterwards.
No denying the housing crisis now, Nick.
Matt McCarten is to head a new Labour party office in Auckland. The party is going to take to fight to National in the city that decides the election. Yet another bold step from Andrew Little, who is looking more and more like the next PM.
John Key is defending his handling of Auckland’s housing crisis on the grounds that Auckland’s prices have only risen as much under him as they did under Labour.
So the prices that he said were a crisis in 2007, have risen by as much again, and thus… no problem?
As the average Auckland house price hits $1 Million, the Special Housing Areas fail, and Real Estate agents openly promote land banking, what does National do? Why, they give up, of course.
The Spinoff: “Lose the top of your party vote in Auckland, with Labour making ground, and the picture for the general election in 2017 looks like, walks like and quacks like a crisis.”
Spinoff: “The Spinoff/SSI survey reveals the extraordinary impact of housing crisis on residents of New Zealand’s biggest city – and the extent to which Aucklanders blame foreign speculation.”
Rodney Hide must be sleeping well, because Auckland’s proposed Unitary Plan will deliver all he and his NACT patrons ever hoped for. The Council should reject the Plan in its current form, cherry-pick those aspects consistent with a democratic and liveable city and sheet home the responsibility to those that created the mess.
What are the Nats doing removing a proposed requirement for affordable housing – exactly the housing that Auckland desperately needs!?
Auckland’s Unitary Plan will be available on the web at 1:30pm today, with a tool for checking the impact on any Auckland address.
The unaffordability of Auckland housing is now seriously impacting even moderately well paid professions. As these trends continue, how is Auckland going to cope without without workers?
It’s naked panic now. In response to the crisis that isn’t a crisis Key is going to overrule the council that his government created and screw over Auckland democracy just like he screwed over Canterbury. What do you think of that Aucklanders?
Reaction to Key’s land tax has been luke warm at best, with strong calls for more effective action. Labour is promising “a ‘tidal wave’ of big housing reforms”…
