National's housing crisis | The Jackal

17 May 2017

National's housing crisis

We should all know that National’s recent announcement to apparently build around 34,000 new houses in Auckland over the next decade is a big fucking joke!

National has once again tried to put a sticking plaster on the gaping wound that is the New Zealand housing crisis. Without some emergency triage, thanks to the government’s inaction, the New Zealand housing market is likely to fall off a cliff.

Yesterday, Radio New Zealand reported:

NZ at 40% risk of housing bust - Goldman Sachs

New Zealand's housing market has a 40 percent chance of going bust in the next two years, according to investment bank Goldman Sachs.

The bank has said this country's housing market is the most over-valued and most vulnerable of a group of 10 developed economies, in a report obtained by the Bloomberg news agency.

A housing "bust" is defined as house prices falling 5 percent or more and is based on the ratio of house prices to rents, household incomes, and house prices adjusted for inflation.

Wow! New Zealand worst in the world again. Well-done National. You would expect that with such predictions by Goldman Sachs the government might be taking the housing crisis seriously. Unfortunately not!

Not only has the Social Housing Minister Amy Adams included the government's current building figures in her calculations, effectively announcing National’s lame duck of a policy twice, they’re also planning to demolish thousands of state houses to free up some land.

Today, Interest.co.nz reported:

The figures:

Adams on Tuesday announced a headline 34,000 new homes would be built on Crown land in Auckland over the next ten years.

The net increase in housing on Crown land will be slightly below 27,000, as 8,300 state houses will first be demolished to make way for the new builds.

To cover those demolished state homes, the plan will see 13,500 social housing units built. That leaves 20,600 other units to be sold after being built. Some will be in the ‘affordable’ category priced below $650,000 with covenants on who can buy them and how they might be on-sold, and others at ‘market price’ with fewer restrictions.

But even a number of those houses are already in the pipeline through social housing plans and the Tamaki and Hobsonville developments. The bulk of “new places” will be 11,500 social houses and 12,800 ‘affordable’ and ‘market’ houses.

So the net result to National’s latest announcement is approximately 5,000 state houses over the next ten years, which is well short of the approximately 40,000 affordable houses required in Auckland right now.

Also consider the fact that we have migration into New Zealand of around 70,000 each year, which is putting extraordinary pressure on our infrastructure.

I guess the government doesn’t give two shits about overcrowding, house price inflation, decreasing homeownership levels and the increasing numbers of homeless Kiwi's wandering the streets, which are just some of the negative consequences to New Zealand’s housing crisis.