I was incredulous that this lummox Christopher Luxon had ever paid attention during even a basic economics course. Landlords aren’t going to pass any cost reductions on to tenants in rent values. They charge new tenants the rental rates that the market can bear. In the absence of significiant new housing or a reduction in population, that is directly related to what tenants can afford to pay
Now Simon Bridges as a bridge to sell you.
While National revert to type with populist scaremongering, Labour is getting on with the business of releasing practical policy that supports real people and addresses real problems.
The last budget raised accommodation supplement – against the advice of Treasury who said that landlords would capture the cash. Not to fear though, because Bill English reckons that landlords can’t raise rents…
Pencilsword does brilliant analysis and commentary in cartoon form. Go check out the latest on the invisible rental crisis…
While much of the coverage of the housing crisis focuses on buyers, the situation facing renters is just as bad. Last week The Spinoff ran an excellent series on renting in NZ: “It’s getting desperate out there”.
The IMF warns that our household debt is far too high, as desperate tenants start raiding the Kiwisaver accounts to pay the rent.
Being tenants in our own country is starting to look like the good old days.
Already sky-high Auckland rents are set to rise further.
Are you saving to buy a house? Are you saving more than $1000 a week? If not, you are going backwards.
Hamilton City Council currently has plans to sell of its remaining pensioner housing stock. It already sold off a block of them in 2012. Of those sold, only 12 out of 53 units are available for seniors to rent at affordable rates. This is because 27 were sold as there was no social service provider able to buy them. So now Council want to sell the rest.
National’s sale of state housing assets and other aspects of housing policy is stupid at all levels. Which is probably why they are confused themselves about it.
There’s something obscene about the way the economic story gets framed: the figures on a page, the points on an index, the number of dollars someone can swap for a number of different-coloured dollars, when people are suffering.
Thousands of tenants in Auckland’s CBD face rent rises from next year as the landlords start, after a 15 year moratorium, to charge market rental. Why is that news? Ahh well, read on…
