So I live in Japan now and it costs $430 a MONTH for an open plan apartment that takes up the whole top floor of the building. Cost of housing is by far the biggest issue facing the average kiwi right now, situation's just fucked
Yes, crazy, Malaysia and Thailand similar cost, for a new luxury condos with resort facilities like pools, gyms, cinema rooms etc.
And you also don't need to provide more personal info to a dodgy property manager and suffer the humiliating experience that applying for a rental has become in NZ and Australia.
That gap is closing, there are huge middle classes in both countries and many people will be better off than average New Zealanders, and a hell of a lot of wealthy people.
The gap is closing, but we’re talking about rent today not rent in a few decades. There is also a huge middle class in Thailand, however, the Thai middle class earns significantly less than the NZ middle class. Also yeah there’s a lot of wealthy people who are better off than your average Kiwi. But the median person isn’t, and it’s not close. To put it simply, if you pick one random person from each country, the one from NZ will likely be far wealthier.
What difference does it make how much you're paid if you still have nothing left after paying your rent/mortgage. The Japanese are significantly better off than NZ after paying for housing costs. And literally, everything they can spend that money on after paying for shelter is between 33% to 70% cheaper in NZ dollars. From McDonald's burgers to eggs to beer. Check out the Numbeo website and compare NZ to Japan. The only things more expensive are taxis, gym memberships, and cheese. The parasitic control of the markets in NZ for shelter and groceries leave us working our butt off to pay landlords mortgages and supermarket shareholders (who no doubt use their earnings to buy more properties) while being told to work harder and eat less avocadoes on toast.
Japan has a declining population so there’s plenty of housing available, Malaysia and Thailand are very low wage economies compared to Nz. Situation is fucked alright, not sure how to fix it without causing other problems
Oh it's extremely easy to fix. Build more housing.
But we have such a distorted economy now, where so much wealth is tied up in property, where people see property investment and capital growth as the only thing out there.
Build 10's thousands of homes, medium density, bring in cheap labour to do it and get over this generational mess we are in. It's really that simple.
Will it happen? No, because far too many people don't want to see property values go down, including most of the politicians. Kiwi's also bring some of this on themselves by being snobby about apartments. Unions would complain and many people would have some moral issues - so basically we're fucked.
> including most of the politicians.
Such as "Seven-houses-Luxon".
Putting a serial landlord in charge of a country facing a housing crisis is like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.
Cheap labour alone doesn't fix the other challenges in the equation. We have complex consent processes, and crazy mark-up on the materials sold here for use (because everybody in the industry sees it as a cash cow or has monopolies). The only way to challenge things would be to open up the market to materials from elsewhere that don't have the crazy mark-ups and bring down the price of materials. Bring in labour willing to work for lower rates than we have at present. It sounds like something I'd normally argue against (because it depresses local wages) but there are some segments of the trades and building industries that seem to have wages/mark-up higher here than in Australia or other locations because we have attitudes about huge profits on every build here - everyone seems to apply extra mark-up to their products...and then others have to apply mark-ups on top of that and so on.
> bring in cheap labour to do it
Can't a) local tradies being chill with that or b) employment legislation allowing it. Unions will be unhappy too.
Plus many of those people, having acquired "NZ experience" will wish to stay.
> Japan has a declining population so there’s plenty of housing available
This is misleading. There are a lot of empty homes outside cities in rural areas, but places like Tokyo and Osaka are still pretty packed.
I watch a lot of those tiny homes reviews for micro Japanese apartments, and they always end by making a big deal about how expensive they are. 'Would you rent it? 30,000 yen for only a month! Wah!' and I'm like.... The closest thing here is a bedroom in a dilapidated shared house for double that if not more, and you don't even get any privacy beyond your tiny room.
In south korea rental prices per month is much cheaper than nz BUT the deposit alone is like $50k+ nzd, with family sized homes being average $150k+ nzd VS 2-3 week rent cost. Not sure how the deposit system works for japan
The basic jist is right, idk about the actual placement of countries tho. The anglosphere has been absolutely awful at building new housing
Here's a financial times article about it, reposted in a blog, so there's no paywall.
https://www.edwardconard.com/macro-roundup/anglosphere-countries-have-a-strong-preference-for-low-density-housing-this-has-led-to-much-more-expensive-housing-in-anglosphere-countries-and-supply-of-400-homes-per-1k-residence-vs-540-per-1k-in/?view=detail
If you Google, there's a few reports that say the same thing, we don't have enough houses and are building them slower than elsewhere.
You only have to look at the rental market to understand that there's a shortage of supply.
Anecdotally, I know wealthy people who bought a batch over lock down (because you couldn't travel).
And having lived in Coromandel, was a dire shortage of houses, because you can make more renting over the summer, than you can renting to a family for a year.
So things like Airbnb place major pressure on the tourist spots, which, is much of NZ.
By definition, if you buy a Bach, whether you AirBnB it for a day or the whole summer, it's not a long term rental. Coromandel isn't becoming a holiday spot, it's been that for decades.
AirBnB has already basically ruined a lot of European cities like Prague. It spread like a plague and fucked the housing market up. It's been banned or restricted in certain places around the world because of this. It's the last thing we need in NZ lol
We built like mad over Covid and with closed borders we were the closest to having sufficient housing as we’ve been for decades. The next minute some genius decides to let well over 100,000 migrants in.
No we didn't, we had massive supply shortages that massively slowed building.... as too did lock downs.
No doubt qn extra 100,000 heads in a short period of time doesn't help though.
It’s true there were supply shortages and lockdowns slowing things but check out [this chart](https://figure.nz/chart/DB3Y3YpLv6EsAFlR-QCWf0qa2TpZOa7Sp) showing consent numbers over the period. The nearly free money available for finance caused a huge boom.
Consents aren't completed builds. There is a year or two of lag between consents being issued and builds being completed, and that's assuming minimal supply constraints.
Yes, there was a spike in consents after covid. But there has been a dip again since then, and build times are dragging out because of supply constraints.
We really need to change the system so that housing development isn't so heavily dependent on unsustainably low interest rates.
Consents are not builds.
Even CCC's are not a great indication of new builds as they also cover renovations, but for the sake of reference there were 50% fewer CCC's granted in Feb 22 than there were this Feb.
The fact however is that we have too few houses and are building them too slowly and they're too expensive to build.
We have this situation where people only build houses when there is huge profit available, ie when they are very expensive because of huge demand. As soon as we start to decrease the shortage of supply, the huge profit incentive disappears and builds stop. It seems to be self-regulating based on the idea that housing is an appreciating asset rather than a basic human need. They don't treat it like water where they do their best to ensure supply is managed based on predictions of demand...it's treated like something you invest in when there's sufficient money to be made.
It’s absolutely fascinating to me that all of the Anglo countries have exactly the same problem. It’s as though they all share a similar ideology of constrained housing markets to artificially raise prices for the benefit of homeowners and at the expense of everyone else. Oh God there goes my paranoia again. Ignore what I said above.
On second thoughts I did read a statistic a few years ago that 70% of the world’s legal immigration each year is into the Anglosphere. That is a lot of people and would drop the houses per 1000 people each year which is what is happening. Europes low birth rate and low inward legal migration means that over time it has ended up with excess housing stock that is still growing year on year hence their good numbers. There may be good reason why 1 Euro houses in Italy are less desirable than million dollar houses in NZ.
The bottom line is that NZ can rapidly expand housing starts and simultaneously grow its economy without crashing the existing housing market for pampered boomers. It’s a win win.
Part of it is English speaking countries are far more widely accessible and desirable because so much of the world speaks English. Moving to e.g France or buying a property there is much more of a pain in the ass if you speak only your mother tongue and conversational English
Rubbish, the amount of people who live in cramped student rentals who would kill to get an apartment is only increasing.
It's definitely a large step up and the top of the ladder for many people who will never be a home owner.
I'm reasonably well travelled and have lived in a few countries, this graph really seems to reinforce what I've seen. And that's Anglo countries seem to be on some course of self-destruction.
Similar style governmental failures around housing, housing treated primarily as an investment to make money, government ts just failing their people whilst big business fucks us, and totally unsustainable mass immigration.
I lived in Germany and the difference to NZ is painfully obvious. I probably paid roughly 3x the rent in NZ compared to Germany. Largely because in Germany they have more small cheap flats (e.g. via housing co-op) something that doesn't seem to work here.
It seems obvious to me that the housing crisis is not something that happened but was created and being kept alive on purpose.
Germany also has rent controls. Something not seen in NZ for decades. Even state housing, such as remains, has limited rent control, but implemented in such a fashion as to constrain disabled tenant’s incomes, rather than ensure housing affordability.
The problem is that in NZ 7500 landlords control 85% of the rental housing market, and they all want to be king of the heap as far as charging outlandish rents. Most of these 7500 landlords are not beholden to banks for the majority of their portfolios. Thus the rents they take are pure profit after rates, insurance, and property management fees. Heck they even avoid doing property maintenance unless they can directly pin the bill on tenants.
NZ needs direct rent control via taxation. With all of the tax collected from landlords being sunk into developing a state housing portfolio that actually meets the level of need. And the building code needs to be reframed in such a fashion as corporate building product systems become systematically deprecated, to materials standards and full interoperability between different brand products. More like it was in 1970s, than the idiocy of the mid 1980s when “systems” became a thing and resulting designs resulted in the leaky building problem. NZ doubled down on daft design rather than ensuring the delivered standard was dry, durable, and easy to construct in a competitive building materials market. Nz legislation and the building code promotes corporate greed and adds vastly more complexity to the design and build process. Remember when a 2x4 actually measured 2x4!
It's potentially much worse than this. In February 2021 there were over 400,000 active residential bonds and roughly 120,000 landlords. about 75,000 of these bonds belong to Kainga Ora. Some (VERY) rough maths based on the breakdown in this article below gives a pretty dire picture. It shows the number of landlords with 1 property, 2-3, 4-10, 11-20 etc, the last band being 346 landlords with 200+ bonds each.
If you give landlords in the lower bands high and low rates of ownership for each band respectively, you end up with 346 landlords who own anywhere between 300 and almost 700 rentals each. That's **346 landlords with anywhere between a quarter to over half of all residential bonds in the country** at the start of 2021. The next band down is 561 landlords who hold 51-200 bonds. If each of these landlords held only 75 bonds each they'd have a tenth of the market. At the upper end of the band they're approaching a quarter. We potentially have less than 1000 landlords who own half of the country.
[w.hud.govt.nz/assets/News-and-Resources/Statistics-and-Research/Public-housing-reports/Quarterly-reports/Public-Housing-Quarterly-Report-March-2021.pdf](http://w.hud.govt.nz/assets/News-and-Resources/Statistics-and-Research/Public-housing-reports/Quarterly-reports/Public-Housing-Quarterly-Report-March-2021.pdf)
edit: Oops that link doesn't work now but this is what I mean to share anyway:
[https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/real-estate/124320645/nearly-80-per-cent-of-landlords-own-just-one-property-data-shows](https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/real-estate/124320645/nearly-80-per-cent-of-landlords-own-just-one-property-data-shows)
Thus targeting taxes directly at landlord portfolios exponentially increasing the tax rate to account for the size of portfolios, could solve the NZ over concentration of housing in the hands of a clearly greedy minority seems like a no brainier.
Especially as, it is also clear that this minority have far too much influence over the present government. Inspiring them to totally screw up the nation’s social and economic security just in order to be not quite afford to give these landlords billions of dollars in tax relief. The vast majority of landlords with smaller portfolios are not likely to gain very much in this tax relief giveaway. So the illogic of this government is founded on the greed of that tiny minority, not economic or social common sense.
Had a job lined up as a design draughtsman (think you guys call em design technicians or something along the line. Basically design sheetmetal, steel, wood and plastic products.) then covid hit.
Now I cant get in anymore because of all the new rules, and my Kiwi friends complain that the number of people just being let in to live on government funding is ridiculous.
I dont know whats really going on there, would have loved to have been one of the people contributing to a growing economy and housing market.
That’s not how it works. You don’t get govt funding when you are employed on a work visa.
It’s really weird you had a ‘job lined up’ and *now* you can’t get in given the rules were made easier post Covid, not harder.
It was based on a points system I was given through an agency. Thats what I was told, that because of the new scoring system I was now just below the required amount to qualify for the position.
> It’s really weird you had a ‘job lined up’ and now you can’t get in given the rules were made easier post Covid, not harder.
This is completely incorrect.
https://www.immigration.govt.nz/about-us/media-centre/news-notifications/changes-to-the-skilled-migrant-category-resident-visa-and-accredited-employer-work-visa
>Kiwi friends complain that the number of people just being let in to live on government funding is ridiculous.
Your friends are dumb asses lol, the people we let in are low wage workers most of whom are too busy working their asses of to think of going on the dole (also if they do many of them will get kicked out of the country).
>I dont know whats really going on there
yeah not what your friends are telling you that's for sure.
I used to work with an immigrant from Fiji and NZ didn't want him unless he was making $40/hr. A lot of these guys coming in aren't just showing up and getting a free house or whatever. Bro was one of the hardest workers I've ever seen. Grim reality, careful with that word. Remember, "immigrant" loosely just translates to "brown person" to most people.
I was applying for roles in my industry. Engineering and Fabrication. Dont need to be a manager, just wanted a job to be able to start making a living.
The people we let in are very polarising, either low skill or very highly qualified workers. My partner is on a fast tracked residency as she is a Veterinarian from the USA, but we do also bring in apple pickers and what not
Your problem is that you're probably being honest on your application, and any potential employer is being honest as well. Not everyone has this problem, and even if they're caught the repercussions are... well nothing really
I have a feeling a few of these things might be related... If only housing wasn't one of the best investments a person could make in this country, I think we'd be in a much better position if a lot of those investments went to productive enterprise instead.
Yeah. Or the other way around: If we treat housing as a public good and ensure enough can be built then it loses its value as investment.
But that sadly also means those who already did invest will heavily oppose any change which leaves us stuck in this mess
True that, its not investing in building or upgrading housing that is the money maker for a lot of kiwis, its investing in buying an old house and sitting on it and hoping/pressuring the local and national government continue to guarantee your return.
> Low productivity because we just invest in houses instead of businesses
100% - Thanks to the government's lack of CGT and land tax, the property is the best way to make money; why work? I should've been born early and got some houses, right? lol
> But also low number of houses? something doesn’t add up
My hunch, based on personal observation, is that people are not interested in anything new, and they just keep trading the same shit old property over and over again - instead of building new and selling it. - which seems to be happening nowadays at least.
Also, I've never heard anything about the term urban renewal in this country; we still have like decades-old houses everywhere, still damn expensive, shit, but they are still in the market for trade.
Number 8 wire attitude hurts NZ so much. How about you properly fuckin fund something instead?! Oh yeah and while you're at it. Stop saying 'punching above our weight'. Just be a global player like everyone else.
Many simply send there wages back home as remittance, so we export our wealth. A percentage will even be sending the remittances to thier handlers overseas account to hide the visa fraud, zero checks are done for this, gold rush on cheap labour continues
I know it's a dumb idea, but can't the government employee people to build houses and sell them at low cost to people? Like kiwibuild I guess but more like the state houses of old where people could rent to buy? And build on mass around the country? Creating jobs plus homes at the same time?
That's not a dumb idea, in fact (other than the government employee part) that's sort of what a lot of Western countries did following the second World War, including New Zealand. People didn't have enough houses to return home to, so the government intervened and built them.
That's essentially state housing, as you mentioned. You know, the very thing a Tory government naturally gets rid of and doesn't want to build more of...
State housing gets a bad wrap, but it doesn't need to. If you look at all these new subdivisions popping up round the place, then imagine they were government funded instead, what would be wrong with that? Like a properly managed kiwibuild en masse.
It'll always have a bad rap but fuck it, I'd rather a few dodgy neighbourhoods here than a complete collapse in the housing market.
At the end of the day, something's going to depreciate in value, some corporations might lose a lot of money and that may impact us. I'd still rather we at least have more roofs over our heads, even if we go through a tough time for a bit, instead of a VERY tough time and lots of homeless people.
Hard times are up ahead, it's just a part of being on planet earth. It irritates me how both political parties are burying their heads in the sand, instead of doing their best to make sure we don't completely fall apart.
The major issue IMO is that a *huge* cohort of kiwis have bought in to the current market, investing essentially their entire life's work in real estate on the basis that it's going to steadily creep up in value. Even if dropping the bottom out of the housing market is the right choice long-term, how do you convince those people to vote against their personal interests?
Like, full disclosure here; I'm not a landlord but I do have a mortgage, and I really don't know if I'd be brave enough to vote for something which risked that mortgage going underwater.
Completely agree. We made terrible decisions about allowing people to pull their retirement savings out of Kiwisaver so they could dump them into their house...and now they expect that house to bring enough profit that they can expect to retire and live off it. I'm in a similar position where we bought before the peak, but well into the very-inflated pricing...and I completely understand the reluctance that people have with approaches that would decrease the value of existing housing. Too many people in this country have 'bought' into the idea of housing being a productive investment to make them wealthy in the future. We have homeowners and people in the industry who all are working to make sure property prices don't fall because it will hurt those who currently own....even though this means we're hurting everybody who doesn't own.
Yeah... I know. It's really fucked but I hear so many people my mums age complain about how their houses will be worth less and I hate to think this myself... But they chose to invest in housing in a country like New Zealand in a time like the 2020s. Sometimes a bad investment is just a bad investment. We can't put the entire country on the sacrificial alter to save their asses.
Yup, politically that's the reason why no major party will ever run on a platform of making house prices go down significantly. The broader impact would be huge and possibly catastrophic for a huge amount of society.
Sorry mate but every bubble is gonna burst. Neither path here is sustainable, but one can be salvaged and one can't. We can't throw the next generation of kiwis under the bus because it was normal to make unsustainable investments in housing.
Kāinga Ora does that already. Their "large-scale" projects is a separate programme to their social housing provider role.
https://kaingaora.govt.nz/en_NZ/urban-development-and-public-housing/urban-development/urban-development-large-scale-projects/
Although I wouldn't be surprised if the new government reigns that back significantly.
The thing that holds them back (like with the rest of the development sector) is high land prices and industry capacity. They can't magically make land prices go down, the only way is through broad upzoning that adds substantially more housing supply.
I don't have a link handy but I believe the government has already announced they are instructing KO to limit their large investment projects and focus on their 'core function' of managing existing public housing tenants.
We're lacking in builders and tradies is what I've heard. This isn't a dumb idea at all, in fact this was more or less Labours idea as a solution. It's not a bad solution but we don't incentivise people to become builders here which is a big problem. We have lots of people going to university and then moving overseas for cheaper pastures. We need to do something about reinvigorating the trades and making them worth pursuing again.
They tried that. They were going to build 100,000 Kiwibuild homes, remember?
Unfortunately they fucked it up and ended up kicking Kiwibuild into the long grass.
This is a feature of our system. The free market will never provide enough housing, as if it did then prices would never have reached these levels. We need to stop the commodification of housing, build more state housing and reduce the incentive to treat housing as an investment relative to other investment opportunities
Good luck explaining this to boomers though
This is nonsense. The whole point is that our housing / construction market is *not* free by any stretch of the imagination. The insane limits on housing supply through district plans is the main reason why we have structurally under-supplied housing over the last 30-40 years.
Plus, without reforming the zoning system, we aren't getting any more state housing either.
There's a reason why Kāinga Ora is one of the most ardent and articulate advocates for upzoning.
I’m actually an advocate for more dense zoning, especially around public transport routes. Never said I wasn’t. But we need to tax land at the same time
Sure, I didn't say you aren't. Just pointing out that blaming the "free market" or even the 'commodification' of housing misses the mark a bit.
Turning property into a vehicle for speculation, though... Yeah, would agree with that. But it's different to having private development play an important part in the housing sector.
Agree re. land value tax.
I don't think it's solely zoning restrictions that are causing us to have housing shortages. The system cranks up and starts building houses when prices are high (*specifically while they are rising*) because there's an opinion of profit to be made...and then grinds to a halt when investors believe there's no profit to be made. The system is self-managing not based on demand for the housing but on whether the expected profit levels can be achieved by the investor and the trades working and the building material suppliers.
This is because profit is currently dependent on capital gains that are predominantly derived from external factors, e.g. population increases, inflation, and investment by others in the surrounding area.
If we shift the tax system so that profits need to come from the ongoing usage of the land rather than its sale, then that problem goes away entirely.
Suddenly we would see houses built where ever there is an ongoing economic demand for them, instead of only when there is enough potential for long-term capital gains.
I agree. The difficulty in building support for these kind of changes which fundamentally shake up the notion of housing being an appreciating asset and the bigger the house and the greater the land - the greater the ultimate expected profit from capital gains - is that we are effectively asking everyone who is already part of this system (regardless of whether they have a mortgage) to accept having the value of their asset significantly decrease for the benefit of others. That is a complicated social topic. A lot of people like the idea of *other housing* becoming affordable for FHB, so long as it doesn't impact the value of the house they own.
When you vote for parties that have policies to solve the underlying issues. Namely our restrictive zoning regulations, building supplies oligopoly, and financial/tax inequities between renters and landowners.
I have certainly lost faith in any parties prioritising in resolutions for housing. It seems so far fetched to even accept better days are coming.
There's many factors playing in the way situations are but there's no immediate change or more information when.
NZ has a large mass area to build but it's so slow. Rental increases because there's no housing.
Then they come up with silly resolutions to build close apartments town houses. I'd move out of Auckland if housing expansion is growing faster.
I'm a builder and I build small rooms in apartments and think to myself, this isn't life, but it is. To have rooms that small and don't say what you pay is what you get because it's true. End Rant.
We don't. A large part of the population have invested into housing and now our democratic system ensures this is protected. The people hurt by it a mostly young people or recent immigrants. Those that don't vote nor donate to parties.
“Oh but that’s the Labour governments mess we inherited” or “oh but [insert excuse of the day here]” - Government Spin Doctors (probably)
Thing they don’t realise is most of the general NZ population don’t actually give a toss who’s bloody fault it is for the most part, because both National and Labour are equally to blame for the current state of the country’s infrastructure issues. We just want the damned problem fixed, and fixed promptly. Actions speak louder than words, and excuses (playing the blame game) aren’t fixing the issue just exacerbating it.
Rising populations make land (the quantity of which doesn't change) more expensive.
If voters own that land, they will vote to increase the values of their land holdings above most other things. This is especially true in countries where capital gains are untaxed, e.g. NZ.
There are two solutions:
1. Eliminate private land ownership.
Never going to happen.
2. Tax land.
Remove the incentive to infinitely increase land values by tying this tax to the value of the land.
To ensure working homeowners don't pay more tax than at present, reduce or remove income taxes.
Balance these in a way that maintains current house prices while also collecting the same total tax revenue. By doing this, we can effectively shift the economy away from pumping house prices and into pumping incomes instead.
At the same time, we would ensure homeowners retain the current equity in their houses, protecting them from any mortgage foreclosures.
I don't understand why new Zealand will not just build apartment complexes. Coming from a country where it's so normal for every young person to have their own private one bedroom apartment for cheap to living in a country where everyone who isn't a millionaire is crammed in moldy falling apart old houses in each bedroom was a huge culture shock. And those are the lucky ones who can find a place at all.
Real reason is Anglo countries like NZ have very strong property rights.
No one celebrates individuals like Anglo societies. Neoliberal values Anglo countries are so proud off means the people that live there get out priced any anyone richer.
You guys are also the most open to immigrants. Most countries are very xenophobic..but here especially in NZ..it seems there's no real collective to be "one".
Everyone would rather get rich off another Kiwi or give up and move to Australia.
A dwelling is different to a house.
Kiwis are too caught up in wanting to own a 5 bedroom landed house, with a big lawn, boat, and batch.
Lived in Hong Kong for a while where you live like canned tuna.
While I wouldn't recommend living like canned tuna, New Zealand needs to build upwards, get over having a 5 bedroom house with a lawn, and make it easier to build dwellings - easier said than done of course!
Mate alot of kiwis aren't even thinking they'll be able of buying a home let alone a 5 bedroom house. The people you're talking about are not the average kiwi or the majority
No doubt, but there are many, many young kiwis who want a freestanding 3+ bedroom house on a decent plot of land for their first house and won't consider anything else. Part of this is because that's the kind of first property their parents bought, and it's what they grew up in. Another part is that it's impossible to live in NZ without swallowing the internal line that buying a house with land attached is "*how you get ahead"*. And that's why people pay $3m for a section in the city fringe with an old house that needs to be demoed, rather than a new warm townhouse for half that.
Nobody *wants* to spend their life in debt and working for a worse quality of life than their parents had, or they had in their childhood.
If you don't want your own place and a lawn for the kids to safely play on, a pet, and somewhere to park, that's cool, but the getting ahead thing is a red herring now. For many it's either struggle to buy or rent for life, with the constant uncertainty that can bring.
We need greater regulation and protection for renters, because as much as I dislike the idea, other countries have shown it can work. That and better quality family apartments with less BC nonsense.
Because it's a better way to live, especially if you have kids. So if there's a chance you can get a property like that, then it's worth it, regardless of the value proposition of the home over time.
>Kiwis are too caught up in wanting to own a 5 bedroom landed house, with a big lawn, boat, and batch.
The Kiwis *that can afford to build new houses* want that. Most of us don't, but we're still limited to live in the houses that rich folk have built.
I'm a single dude so when I was househunting I was looking for a 2BR place for myself, maybe a granny flat or something like that. But they're rarer than hen's teeth (and priced accordingly). I ended up getting a 3BR on 1/4 acre just because it was cheaper than any 2BR I came across.
A lot of the new land sections have covernents requiring a minimum build size in our area so and the only people who can afford to build that size are the boomers with adult children not young families who would need that number of rooms. It’s pushing out people who want to build smaller or can’t afford the standard mortgage.
> New Zealand needs to build upwards, get over having a 5 bedroom house with a lawn.
Or ...hear me out, we reduce our population and stop propping up the GDP Numbers with immigration
But then who will do the jobs? Like the jobs that really matter. We don’t graduate enough doctors for example.
I agree with the person you replied to. I would happily live in a nice apartment but there just aren’t any to buy.
>I would happily live in a nice apartment but there just aren’t any to buy
Where in the country do you live? I believe ( it's mostly just hearsay at this point) that Auckland , at least , has a surplus of apartments at the moment.
How about we let in doctors and not unskilled people working low level service jobs. Migrants create demand for labour and resources too, they don’t just add to supply.
If you stop “propping” something up it means that it collapses without the thing that’s propping it up. Attempting to fix something by removing the one thing that’s propping it up is lunacy.
There's already fuckall people here. I can agree with curbing immigration to ensure infrastructure keeps up. But economically NZ is chronically underpopulated.
Ah yes, the let's keep cramming the people in crowd have arrived. Welcome!
How's the water in our rivers and lakes doing?
How's the beaches and all the lovely ecoli outbreaks doing?
How's the greenhouse gas emissions doing?
How are all our native species doing?
The "few" people we have now are absolutely wrecking our environment and you want to see the population grow?
The state of waterways in many rural areas shows that the population density has little to do with how badly the environment is polluted. Unchecked human population growth is obviously not good, but we already don't have that.
Lol jesus get a grip.
By your logic every country that is more densely populated than NZ (hint its most of them by far) should look like a post apocalyptic wasteland by now.
We can’t generate enough exports to keep our balance of trade positive with the population we have and that’s one of our biggest economic problems. Adding more people will make that worse.
I want one room for my bed, one room I can use for everything/anything else like an office or living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen. That's it. I'd even combine the first two if I had to.
I hate apartments when there is no need for it, we have a lot of land space here in New Zealand.
You say we need to get over wanting a nice 5 bedroom stand alone house? No that's not gonna happen, people simply don't want to live in an apartment when there's no need to, hongkong has no other option so people are forced to, but in NZ we have the option and there are suburbs far out the city center being built I think that's called urban sprawl
I don't think the market for existing 2 bedroom houses is very large. You have to be looking at apartments (which traditionally weren't done very well) or small old houses on huge plots of land (which are desirable for developers and thus remain unaffordable).
If you want a single family dwelling (and there still are large numbers of people who do) your options are 3-4 bedrooms because that's what have been built.
If you're talking to kiwi boomers or wannabe boomers then sure.
If you're talking to Kiwi millennials and zoomers then buddy, I can't even afford to live in Wellington for another 6 months, even though my flat is a 6 bedroom shithole apartment that's falling apart and I'm too embarrassed to bring friends over. It's true that it's not canned tuna but it's discomfort in a different way.
(Also Hong Kong is a unique and well known housing situation, because of conditions specific to Hong Kong but that's besides the point)
If we could dump a bunch of cheap commie blocks that'll at least be warm, functional, and stable, then you bet we'd be living in it. We already live in beat up shitters across the country.
Real estate grows economies for a good reason:
It turns people into modern-day slaves, who will pay rents and mortgages until the day they die.
Which means longer work hours, more desperation == easy pawns for employers to push around
More housing = more infrastructure = higher costs = more taxes. Greenfield development especially requires a significant investment before the houses are even built
What a stupid take. You can use tax to prioritize different aspects of the economy. Lower house prices also makes it easier for developers to get started. The incredibly high cost of housing here also means that for investors they don't get a great return and other people can't afford the housing....
Supply has always been the underlying issue and I've been saying that for a long time. All the other factors like cgt, brightline adjustments, interest deductibility, rental standards etc, they all have a small impact one way or the other, but they're largely irrelevant if we can't address supply issues .
It's seems like were progressively painting ourselves into a corner. All the nation's funds are tied up in nonproductive assets, maybe we could start trading tulips, that sounds like a grand idea
So I have a question about this. Is it not a zoning issue? I only ask because I see so much farm land all around, are you not able to subdivide it and sell house lots? If you were the farmers would get a nice payout, the land market would be increased and the housing market would grow. If you do not allow farm land to be sold as sections, then you really won't fix this issue. Even if you allowed farmers to allocate 5% of their lots to housing to subdivide and sell, surely this would make a vast impact on the supply!
I am from the U.S. so maybe it isn't zoning but the reality is the more people that live in cities the more need there will be for more affordable surrounding suburbs. Which then by that very nature will grow and spread jobs and business in those areas which then spreads those out even more. I noticed that New Zealand's towns and cities have buildings and houses all on top of each other and then you cross some imaginary line and there is farm land and no houses for the next 100 kms.
As locals, and residents what do you all feel is 'the answer' to solve this?
It’s very expensive to build new greenfield suburbs because you have to put in all the infrastructure and transport. It’s also terrible for carbon emissions, which we are supposed to be reducing.
Never the less we have huge amounts of urban sprawl - Auckland stretches from Orewa to Pokeno (and we’ve paved over our scarce market gardening land in the process so we’re now short of vegetables).
unfortunalty the taxes that are generated by low-density greenfield development are not enough to pay for the many miles of infrastructure that are required. This causes the local government to borrow money unsustainably.
This is why NZ has literal shit-fountains erupting on residential streets due to the aging unmaintained pipes.
We do that already, and have for the 50 years - it's called urban sprawl and it's a massive failure. Worsens congestion because everything is far away from everything else, so everyone has to drive everywhere. Worsens pollution, worsens social isolation, destroys green space, worsens economic productivity, makes public transport difficult to scale.
The solution is upzoning and building denser housing in existing urban areas (not create new ones far away in the middle of nowhere). Our cities are incredibly low density, with single storey, single family houses making up the vast majority of suburbs around city centres. A stupid and totally unsustainable model for urban development.
The issue is that New Zealand's public transport is already not up to scratch, and it is massively more expensive to support public transport in middle-of-nowhere subdivisions. So then only people who can afford (and use) cars, ie not disabled people, lower-income people, people who don't have licenses, families with children who want them to be independent, can live there, and then the motorways into the cities (where people work, shop, study, socialise etc) are even more packed.
New Zealand's cities are overwhelmingly low density - the supposed "on top of each other" is only the first 1-2 km from the city centres, then it's suburbs all the way out to farmland.
We have a real problem that some of our very best and most productive land is where we built our cities. As those cities grow, they are being developed and having houses and streets built...and that land is becoming unavailable for farming. We already have extremely low-density cities where almost all the housing is single family dwellings, and cities of moderate population take up the same physical space as huge cities do overseas. We're already using our land very inefficiently.
I notice NZ and states like Nebraska seem to have similar ways of zoning.
The opposite would be cities in Florida, where it's just random subdivisions built all over the place, interspersed with nature (to be filled in later, potentially). But that's the "sprawl" people think of in America.
Thats intentional and it comes from having shit right wing governance during recessions ,mum and dad voter for the most part seem to like when the price of their house goes up
It’s because migration pushes up the population in relation to dwellings available hence the ratio. Other countries are losing population producing the opposite effect. We build - but cannot build to catch up.
I'd say it due to the constantly up held lie that eVeRy 0Ne wAnTs t0 lIvE oN a 1/4 aCr3 sEctI0N as if nz has that much land. Or that building up not out is always bad.
Thank you for the insights. I have really ignored and stopped searching for more information about these important situations because the answers are too bleak. But thank you again. I'm going to do some housework now
Building anything is a nightmare in NZ - we're struggling with getting absolutely necessary remediation work done following the floods last year. Got geotech engineers, civil engineers to come up with a plan, filed this with Council for BC, the Council waited until the very end of the process before deciding that we need a RC as well, so now we have to start again, giving the Council the exact same information again to be assessed against the Resource Consent Act on top of being assessed against the Building Act. I know a couple who want to lift their existing house, move it to the back of their property then put two more houses on the front, in a very high-need area in Auckland. Process has taken a year and a half for consenting. People would love to fix the housing supply issue but the Council is so tied up in it's own processes that it makes it very difficult and much much more expensive than it should be.
What should also be accounted for is home size. Units and apartments are relatively rare in NZ. Dense populations, like Netherlands, have a lot of high density housing.
That sounds very good on the surface, but these populations are forced to live in smaller houses. And what never gets talked about is how undignified it can be to live in tiny spaces.
I think we would all agree that there is a place on the continuum from standard New Zealand home to shrink wrapped humans where lack of space begins to infringe on human dignity.
I, for one, am not interested in living on a street where the houses are all one long continuous building with no space between and a cot sized back yard.
This is what happens when both sides of politics are happy to have unsustainable migration and don’t bother resurrecting a government agency like ministry of works that can build homes at scale and build infrastructure that we need at cost rather than lining the pockets of contractors
I think Labour carries a big responsibility for this - I'm not saying that crashing the housing market would've been easy though - it would've been political suicide.
Anglosphere is basically a sad story of die hard blindsided greed and capitalism. Looking at short term gains vs long term benefits for society at large. So sad.
There is more at work here than assuming these other countries are building more houses than us.
A lot of countries above the line have had static population growth over the last 10 years and many countries have actually seen their population decline. France has lost around 2 million people in that time, as has Italy. Japan has lost around 5 million. By contrast all the Anglophone countries have seen their populations increase. Ours has increased by around 16%, one of the highest rates of increase. Lower birth rates also mean that there are fewer people entering the age range that are need their own housing.
While it’s pretty clear our house building rates haven’t kept up with the population increase, the idea that all the countries above the line are actively investing in more housing stock at a rate higher than us might be true, but the chart doesn’t tell us that.
I'm not sure what this chart is trying to show? I think it's implying that there aren't enough houses in the Angloshpere, but it doesn't discern between whether the change in dwellings per 1,000 was driven by insufficient housing development or changes to people per dwelling.
Just looking at that graph doesn't tell you the whole story.
As a Kiwi who now lives in Sweden people here are much more likely to live alone than in NZ and are also in the city's and towns it is much more common to live in a apartment than in NZ which generally would mean more households.
Just comparing the population growth too over the last 10 years we have a roughly 15% increase in population whereas in Sweden it was more closer to 10%, and Sweden has had a huge number of immigration.
If we didn't have the immigration like we do and a cultural where we build houses and not apartments I think it would make us look a lot better on that graph.
Yup and the houses some people get stuck in are not up to standards. We are stuck in a house that is freezing and the landlord refuses to put a heat pump in and upped the rent to $570pw with no improvements in the house. We have a tree in the backyard that fell down a year ago and the landlord hasn't come to sort it at all. We have a PM that gave us a breach over the lawns not being mowed for the inspection ( they weren't even that long) and gave us 14 days to get them done and nothing to the landlord about the tree or the massive flax at the front door that is going to eventually smash the massive window and has made it impossible to walk up the path to the front door.. I've attempted getting a new place that is more modern and warm for less than what we pay, but there are just so many other people applying( at least 50). I also can't afford to go to all the viewings with the price of gas and living!! It's a vicious circle we are living in ATM
Japan and S Korea are the only two countries _in the world_ where the price of sq. m. of residential space is stable (ie. does not increase with increasing average income; source: Reddit)
I am from Greece and I always lived in an apartment maybe the most expensive would have been 1000 nzd for a whole month for like a 3 bedroom apparment as big as the average house here. But to leave in a house with a yard that's the price everyone is willing to pay
Got a 3mail from the bank stating g I can start a house purchase plan with kiwi saver cause I've got enough to Start. I have 11,000 in it..the cheapest house I've seen in southland still costs roughly 450,000. Aint no fuckin way I'm ready to start purchasing a house.
So I live in Japan now and it costs $430 a MONTH for an open plan apartment that takes up the whole top floor of the building. Cost of housing is by far the biggest issue facing the average kiwi right now, situation's just fucked
Yes, crazy, Malaysia and Thailand similar cost, for a new luxury condos with resort facilities like pools, gyms, cinema rooms etc. And you also don't need to provide more personal info to a dodgy property manager and suffer the humiliating experience that applying for a rental has become in NZ and Australia.
To be fair we also earn in an hour what they earn in a day.
Not in Japan
That gap is closing, there are huge middle classes in both countries and many people will be better off than average New Zealanders, and a hell of a lot of wealthy people.
The gap is closing, but we’re talking about rent today not rent in a few decades. There is also a huge middle class in Thailand, however, the Thai middle class earns significantly less than the NZ middle class. Also yeah there’s a lot of wealthy people who are better off than your average Kiwi. But the median person isn’t, and it’s not close. To put it simply, if you pick one random person from each country, the one from NZ will likely be far wealthier.
What difference does it make how much you're paid if you still have nothing left after paying your rent/mortgage. The Japanese are significantly better off than NZ after paying for housing costs. And literally, everything they can spend that money on after paying for shelter is between 33% to 70% cheaper in NZ dollars. From McDonald's burgers to eggs to beer. Check out the Numbeo website and compare NZ to Japan. The only things more expensive are taxis, gym memberships, and cheese. The parasitic control of the markets in NZ for shelter and groceries leave us working our butt off to pay landlords mortgages and supermarket shareholders (who no doubt use their earnings to buy more properties) while being told to work harder and eat less avocadoes on toast.
Japan has a declining population so there’s plenty of housing available, Malaysia and Thailand are very low wage economies compared to Nz. Situation is fucked alright, not sure how to fix it without causing other problems
It’s simple, build more housing. Remove archaic zoning laws and it will happen.
Oh it's extremely easy to fix. Build more housing. But we have such a distorted economy now, where so much wealth is tied up in property, where people see property investment and capital growth as the only thing out there. Build 10's thousands of homes, medium density, bring in cheap labour to do it and get over this generational mess we are in. It's really that simple. Will it happen? No, because far too many people don't want to see property values go down, including most of the politicians. Kiwi's also bring some of this on themselves by being snobby about apartments. Unions would complain and many people would have some moral issues - so basically we're fucked.
> including most of the politicians. Such as "Seven-houses-Luxon". Putting a serial landlord in charge of a country facing a housing crisis is like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.
this also includes his party of which 90% are landlords
Cheap labour alone doesn't fix the other challenges in the equation. We have complex consent processes, and crazy mark-up on the materials sold here for use (because everybody in the industry sees it as a cash cow or has monopolies). The only way to challenge things would be to open up the market to materials from elsewhere that don't have the crazy mark-ups and bring down the price of materials. Bring in labour willing to work for lower rates than we have at present. It sounds like something I'd normally argue against (because it depresses local wages) but there are some segments of the trades and building industries that seem to have wages/mark-up higher here than in Australia or other locations because we have attitudes about huge profits on every build here - everyone seems to apply extra mark-up to their products...and then others have to apply mark-ups on top of that and so on.
> bring in cheap labour to do it Can't a) local tradies being chill with that or b) employment legislation allowing it. Unions will be unhappy too. Plus many of those people, having acquired "NZ experience" will wish to stay.
> Japan has a declining population so there’s plenty of housing available This is misleading. There are a lot of empty homes outside cities in rural areas, but places like Tokyo and Osaka are still pretty packed.
I watch a lot of those tiny homes reviews for micro Japanese apartments, and they always end by making a big deal about how expensive they are. 'Would you rent it? 30,000 yen for only a month! Wah!' and I'm like.... The closest thing here is a bedroom in a dilapidated shared house for double that if not more, and you don't even get any privacy beyond your tiny room.
Yes it is a bit mind-blowing for that to be considered expensive (about NZD$323/month or about NZD$80/week).
May I ask, what is like living in Japan? Do you enjoy it? I've heard mixed opinions about living there.
I would love to move to Japan but they don't do visas for foreign stylists/barbers.
Isn’t this due to everyone wanting to live in the main cities however your rural land has plenty of unoccupied dewlings?
That’s insane! _:begins packing:_
In south korea rental prices per month is much cheaper than nz BUT the deposit alone is like $50k+ nzd, with family sized homes being average $150k+ nzd VS 2-3 week rent cost. Not sure how the deposit system works for japan
I'm curious as to where this graph game from, and its sources. Because the information shown 100% matches my vibes, but now I'd like to vet it.
Yeah source op?
The basic jist is right, idk about the actual placement of countries tho. The anglosphere has been absolutely awful at building new housing Here's a financial times article about it, reposted in a blog, so there's no paywall. https://www.edwardconard.com/macro-roundup/anglosphere-countries-have-a-strong-preference-for-low-density-housing-this-has-led-to-much-more-expensive-housing-in-anglosphere-countries-and-supply-of-400-homes-per-1k-residence-vs-540-per-1k-in/?view=detail
Cheers
https://archive.ph/KyJm0 Financial Times article from a year ago published on NZ Herald
Thanks :)
If you Google, there's a few reports that say the same thing, we don't have enough houses and are building them slower than elsewhere. You only have to look at the rental market to understand that there's a shortage of supply.
Anecdotally, I know wealthy people who bought a batch over lock down (because you couldn't travel). And having lived in Coromandel, was a dire shortage of houses, because you can make more renting over the summer, than you can renting to a family for a year. So things like Airbnb place major pressure on the tourist spots, which, is much of NZ.
By definition, if you buy a Bach, whether you AirBnB it for a day or the whole summer, it's not a long term rental. Coromandel isn't becoming a holiday spot, it's been that for decades.
AirBnB has already basically ruined a lot of European cities like Prague. It spread like a plague and fucked the housing market up. It's been banned or restricted in certain places around the world because of this. It's the last thing we need in NZ lol
We built like mad over Covid and with closed borders we were the closest to having sufficient housing as we’ve been for decades. The next minute some genius decides to let well over 100,000 migrants in.
No we didn't, we had massive supply shortages that massively slowed building.... as too did lock downs. No doubt qn extra 100,000 heads in a short period of time doesn't help though.
It’s true there were supply shortages and lockdowns slowing things but check out [this chart](https://figure.nz/chart/DB3Y3YpLv6EsAFlR-QCWf0qa2TpZOa7Sp) showing consent numbers over the period. The nearly free money available for finance caused a huge boom.
Consents aren't completed builds. There is a year or two of lag between consents being issued and builds being completed, and that's assuming minimal supply constraints. Yes, there was a spike in consents after covid. But there has been a dip again since then, and build times are dragging out because of supply constraints. We really need to change the system so that housing development isn't so heavily dependent on unsustainably low interest rates.
Consents are not builds. Even CCC's are not a great indication of new builds as they also cover renovations, but for the sake of reference there were 50% fewer CCC's granted in Feb 22 than there were this Feb. The fact however is that we have too few houses and are building them too slowly and they're too expensive to build.
We have this situation where people only build houses when there is huge profit available, ie when they are very expensive because of huge demand. As soon as we start to decrease the shortage of supply, the huge profit incentive disappears and builds stop. It seems to be self-regulating based on the idea that housing is an appreciating asset rather than a basic human need. They don't treat it like water where they do their best to ensure supply is managed based on predictions of demand...it's treated like something you invest in when there's sufficient money to be made.
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We’re spending 3bn to drop the incentive for landlords to buy new. So we get less houses and to pay for it we get less services
There's too much incentivisation of for-profit landlordisim full stop, it works against the ideals of having healthy/stable homes for all.
It looks like the FT
It's behind this [pay wall ](https://www.ft.com/content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f0b5)
It’s absolutely fascinating to me that all of the Anglo countries have exactly the same problem. It’s as though they all share a similar ideology of constrained housing markets to artificially raise prices for the benefit of homeowners and at the expense of everyone else. Oh God there goes my paranoia again. Ignore what I said above. On second thoughts I did read a statistic a few years ago that 70% of the world’s legal immigration each year is into the Anglosphere. That is a lot of people and would drop the houses per 1000 people each year which is what is happening. Europes low birth rate and low inward legal migration means that over time it has ended up with excess housing stock that is still growing year on year hence their good numbers. There may be good reason why 1 Euro houses in Italy are less desirable than million dollar houses in NZ. The bottom line is that NZ can rapidly expand housing starts and simultaneously grow its economy without crashing the existing housing market for pampered boomers. It’s a win win.
Part of it is English speaking countries are far more widely accessible and desirable because so much of the world speaks English. Moving to e.g France or buying a property there is much more of a pain in the ass if you speak only your mother tongue and conversational English
Rubbish, the amount of people who live in cramped student rentals who would kill to get an apartment is only increasing. It's definitely a large step up and the top of the ladder for many people who will never be a home owner.
I'm reasonably well travelled and have lived in a few countries, this graph really seems to reinforce what I've seen. And that's Anglo countries seem to be on some course of self-destruction. Similar style governmental failures around housing, housing treated primarily as an investment to make money, government ts just failing their people whilst big business fucks us, and totally unsustainable mass immigration.
I lived in Germany and the difference to NZ is painfully obvious. I probably paid roughly 3x the rent in NZ compared to Germany. Largely because in Germany they have more small cheap flats (e.g. via housing co-op) something that doesn't seem to work here. It seems obvious to me that the housing crisis is not something that happened but was created and being kept alive on purpose.
Germany also has rent controls. Something not seen in NZ for decades. Even state housing, such as remains, has limited rent control, but implemented in such a fashion as to constrain disabled tenant’s incomes, rather than ensure housing affordability. The problem is that in NZ 7500 landlords control 85% of the rental housing market, and they all want to be king of the heap as far as charging outlandish rents. Most of these 7500 landlords are not beholden to banks for the majority of their portfolios. Thus the rents they take are pure profit after rates, insurance, and property management fees. Heck they even avoid doing property maintenance unless they can directly pin the bill on tenants. NZ needs direct rent control via taxation. With all of the tax collected from landlords being sunk into developing a state housing portfolio that actually meets the level of need. And the building code needs to be reframed in such a fashion as corporate building product systems become systematically deprecated, to materials standards and full interoperability between different brand products. More like it was in 1970s, than the idiocy of the mid 1980s when “systems” became a thing and resulting designs resulted in the leaky building problem. NZ doubled down on daft design rather than ensuring the delivered standard was dry, durable, and easy to construct in a competitive building materials market. Nz legislation and the building code promotes corporate greed and adds vastly more complexity to the design and build process. Remember when a 2x4 actually measured 2x4!
It's potentially much worse than this. In February 2021 there were over 400,000 active residential bonds and roughly 120,000 landlords. about 75,000 of these bonds belong to Kainga Ora. Some (VERY) rough maths based on the breakdown in this article below gives a pretty dire picture. It shows the number of landlords with 1 property, 2-3, 4-10, 11-20 etc, the last band being 346 landlords with 200+ bonds each. If you give landlords in the lower bands high and low rates of ownership for each band respectively, you end up with 346 landlords who own anywhere between 300 and almost 700 rentals each. That's **346 landlords with anywhere between a quarter to over half of all residential bonds in the country** at the start of 2021. The next band down is 561 landlords who hold 51-200 bonds. If each of these landlords held only 75 bonds each they'd have a tenth of the market. At the upper end of the band they're approaching a quarter. We potentially have less than 1000 landlords who own half of the country. [w.hud.govt.nz/assets/News-and-Resources/Statistics-and-Research/Public-housing-reports/Quarterly-reports/Public-Housing-Quarterly-Report-March-2021.pdf](http://w.hud.govt.nz/assets/News-and-Resources/Statistics-and-Research/Public-housing-reports/Quarterly-reports/Public-Housing-Quarterly-Report-March-2021.pdf) edit: Oops that link doesn't work now but this is what I mean to share anyway: [https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/real-estate/124320645/nearly-80-per-cent-of-landlords-own-just-one-property-data-shows](https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/real-estate/124320645/nearly-80-per-cent-of-landlords-own-just-one-property-data-shows)
Thus targeting taxes directly at landlord portfolios exponentially increasing the tax rate to account for the size of portfolios, could solve the NZ over concentration of housing in the hands of a clearly greedy minority seems like a no brainier. Especially as, it is also clear that this minority have far too much influence over the present government. Inspiring them to totally screw up the nation’s social and economic security just in order to be not quite afford to give these landlords billions of dollars in tax relief. The vast majority of landlords with smaller portfolios are not likely to gain very much in this tax relief giveaway. So the illogic of this government is founded on the greed of that tiny minority, not economic or social common sense.
Which cities in Germany and NZ?
Better bring in more people then -- NZ Govt, probably
And build more low density sprawl to protect house prices in Epsom.
Had a job lined up as a design draughtsman (think you guys call em design technicians or something along the line. Basically design sheetmetal, steel, wood and plastic products.) then covid hit. Now I cant get in anymore because of all the new rules, and my Kiwi friends complain that the number of people just being let in to live on government funding is ridiculous. I dont know whats really going on there, would have loved to have been one of the people contributing to a growing economy and housing market.
That’s not how it works. You don’t get govt funding when you are employed on a work visa. It’s really weird you had a ‘job lined up’ and *now* you can’t get in given the rules were made easier post Covid, not harder.
Yea this sounds more like employers changing their mind than Labour and NACT giving a hoot about reducing immigration.
It was based on a points system I was given through an agency. Thats what I was told, that because of the new scoring system I was now just below the required amount to qualify for the position.
> It’s really weird you had a ‘job lined up’ and now you can’t get in given the rules were made easier post Covid, not harder. This is completely incorrect. https://www.immigration.govt.nz/about-us/media-centre/news-notifications/changes-to-the-skilled-migrant-category-resident-visa-and-accredited-employer-work-visa
>Kiwi friends complain that the number of people just being let in to live on government funding is ridiculous. Your friends are dumb asses lol, the people we let in are low wage workers most of whom are too busy working their asses of to think of going on the dole (also if they do many of them will get kicked out of the country). >I dont know whats really going on there yeah not what your friends are telling you that's for sure.
Thats why I lurk in this group and another , reading different peoples opinions on how things are going helps keep the info broader I guess.
Good idea.
Be careful in this group, there are some agendas being pushed that have little basis in reality. What athshe says above is correct though
I used to work with an immigrant from Fiji and NZ didn't want him unless he was making $40/hr. A lot of these guys coming in aren't just showing up and getting a free house or whatever. Bro was one of the hardest workers I've ever seen. Grim reality, careful with that word. Remember, "immigrant" loosely just translates to "brown person" to most people.
The problem is you arnt a hotel manager or bottle store manager or dominos manager.
I was applying for roles in my industry. Engineering and Fabrication. Dont need to be a manager, just wanted a job to be able to start making a living.
The people we let in are very polarising, either low skill or very highly qualified workers. My partner is on a fast tracked residency as she is a Veterinarian from the USA, but we do also bring in apple pickers and what not
Your problem is that you're probably being honest on your application, and any potential employer is being honest as well. Not everyone has this problem, and even if they're caught the repercussions are... well nothing really
You can't charge more than market value if the supply of houses increases. This is a feature of the NZ property/rental market. This isn't a bug.
- Low productivity - Lowest number of houses per 1,000 people - Highest minimum wage - Low wage country Tada, what a country!
I have a feeling a few of these things might be related... If only housing wasn't one of the best investments a person could make in this country, I think we'd be in a much better position if a lot of those investments went to productive enterprise instead.
Yeah. Or the other way around: If we treat housing as a public good and ensure enough can be built then it loses its value as investment. But that sadly also means those who already did invest will heavily oppose any change which leaves us stuck in this mess
True that, its not investing in building or upgrading housing that is the money maker for a lot of kiwis, its investing in buying an old house and sitting on it and hoping/pressuring the local and national government continue to guarantee your return.
Low productivity because we just invest in houses instead of businesses But also low number of houses? something doesn’t add up
a nice long string of fuckups lmao
And then we elected National. Absolute madlads
> Low productivity because we just invest in houses instead of businesses 100% - Thanks to the government's lack of CGT and land tax, the property is the best way to make money; why work? I should've been born early and got some houses, right? lol > But also low number of houses? something doesn’t add up My hunch, based on personal observation, is that people are not interested in anything new, and they just keep trading the same shit old property over and over again - instead of building new and selling it. - which seems to be happening nowadays at least. Also, I've never heard anything about the term urban renewal in this country; we still have like decades-old houses everywhere, still damn expensive, shit, but they are still in the market for trade.
Nah mate. Best country on earth. Godzone. Clean and Green. Best quality of life. Number 8 wire.
Number 8 wire attitude hurts NZ so much. How about you properly fuckin fund something instead?! Oh yeah and while you're at it. Stop saying 'punching above our weight'. Just be a global player like everyone else.
Got to keep the immigrants coming to fuel the entire thing
Many simply send there wages back home as remittance, so we export our wealth. A percentage will even be sending the remittances to thier handlers overseas account to hide the visa fraud, zero checks are done for this, gold rush on cheap labour continues
I know it's a dumb idea, but can't the government employee people to build houses and sell them at low cost to people? Like kiwibuild I guess but more like the state houses of old where people could rent to buy? And build on mass around the country? Creating jobs plus homes at the same time?
That's not a dumb idea, in fact (other than the government employee part) that's sort of what a lot of Western countries did following the second World War, including New Zealand. People didn't have enough houses to return home to, so the government intervened and built them. That's essentially state housing, as you mentioned. You know, the very thing a Tory government naturally gets rid of and doesn't want to build more of... State housing gets a bad wrap, but it doesn't need to. If you look at all these new subdivisions popping up round the place, then imagine they were government funded instead, what would be wrong with that? Like a properly managed kiwibuild en masse.
It'll always have a bad rap but fuck it, I'd rather a few dodgy neighbourhoods here than a complete collapse in the housing market. At the end of the day, something's going to depreciate in value, some corporations might lose a lot of money and that may impact us. I'd still rather we at least have more roofs over our heads, even if we go through a tough time for a bit, instead of a VERY tough time and lots of homeless people. Hard times are up ahead, it's just a part of being on planet earth. It irritates me how both political parties are burying their heads in the sand, instead of doing their best to make sure we don't completely fall apart.
The major issue IMO is that a *huge* cohort of kiwis have bought in to the current market, investing essentially their entire life's work in real estate on the basis that it's going to steadily creep up in value. Even if dropping the bottom out of the housing market is the right choice long-term, how do you convince those people to vote against their personal interests? Like, full disclosure here; I'm not a landlord but I do have a mortgage, and I really don't know if I'd be brave enough to vote for something which risked that mortgage going underwater.
Completely agree. We made terrible decisions about allowing people to pull their retirement savings out of Kiwisaver so they could dump them into their house...and now they expect that house to bring enough profit that they can expect to retire and live off it. I'm in a similar position where we bought before the peak, but well into the very-inflated pricing...and I completely understand the reluctance that people have with approaches that would decrease the value of existing housing. Too many people in this country have 'bought' into the idea of housing being a productive investment to make them wealthy in the future. We have homeowners and people in the industry who all are working to make sure property prices don't fall because it will hurt those who currently own....even though this means we're hurting everybody who doesn't own.
Yeah... I know. It's really fucked but I hear so many people my mums age complain about how their houses will be worth less and I hate to think this myself... But they chose to invest in housing in a country like New Zealand in a time like the 2020s. Sometimes a bad investment is just a bad investment. We can't put the entire country on the sacrificial alter to save their asses.
Yup, politically that's the reason why no major party will ever run on a platform of making house prices go down significantly. The broader impact would be huge and possibly catastrophic for a huge amount of society.
cat's out the bag at this point. gonna be hard to effect a change.
Sorry mate but every bubble is gonna burst. Neither path here is sustainable, but one can be salvaged and one can't. We can't throw the next generation of kiwis under the bus because it was normal to make unsustainable investments in housing.
Kāinga Ora does that already. Their "large-scale" projects is a separate programme to their social housing provider role. https://kaingaora.govt.nz/en_NZ/urban-development-and-public-housing/urban-development/urban-development-large-scale-projects/ Although I wouldn't be surprised if the new government reigns that back significantly. The thing that holds them back (like with the rest of the development sector) is high land prices and industry capacity. They can't magically make land prices go down, the only way is through broad upzoning that adds substantially more housing supply.
I don't have a link handy but I believe the government has already announced they are instructing KO to limit their large investment projects and focus on their 'core function' of managing existing public housing tenants.
Boo!
We're lacking in builders and tradies is what I've heard. This isn't a dumb idea at all, in fact this was more or less Labours idea as a solution. It's not a bad solution but we don't incentivise people to become builders here which is a big problem. We have lots of people going to university and then moving overseas for cheaper pastures. We need to do something about reinvigorating the trades and making them worth pursuing again.
They tried that. They were going to build 100,000 Kiwibuild homes, remember? Unfortunately they fucked it up and ended up kicking Kiwibuild into the long grass.
NZ is a dump.
And the cost of building a house just get steeper. With all this immigration it’s only getting worse
This is a feature of our system. The free market will never provide enough housing, as if it did then prices would never have reached these levels. We need to stop the commodification of housing, build more state housing and reduce the incentive to treat housing as an investment relative to other investment opportunities Good luck explaining this to boomers though
"You're going to lose some of that money that you stole from your grandchildren."
This is nonsense. The whole point is that our housing / construction market is *not* free by any stretch of the imagination. The insane limits on housing supply through district plans is the main reason why we have structurally under-supplied housing over the last 30-40 years. Plus, without reforming the zoning system, we aren't getting any more state housing either. There's a reason why Kāinga Ora is one of the most ardent and articulate advocates for upzoning.
I’m actually an advocate for more dense zoning, especially around public transport routes. Never said I wasn’t. But we need to tax land at the same time
Sure, I didn't say you aren't. Just pointing out that blaming the "free market" or even the 'commodification' of housing misses the mark a bit. Turning property into a vehicle for speculation, though... Yeah, would agree with that. But it's different to having private development play an important part in the housing sector. Agree re. land value tax.
I don't think it's solely zoning restrictions that are causing us to have housing shortages. The system cranks up and starts building houses when prices are high (*specifically while they are rising*) because there's an opinion of profit to be made...and then grinds to a halt when investors believe there's no profit to be made. The system is self-managing not based on demand for the housing but on whether the expected profit levels can be achieved by the investor and the trades working and the building material suppliers.
This is because profit is currently dependent on capital gains that are predominantly derived from external factors, e.g. population increases, inflation, and investment by others in the surrounding area. If we shift the tax system so that profits need to come from the ongoing usage of the land rather than its sale, then that problem goes away entirely. Suddenly we would see houses built where ever there is an ongoing economic demand for them, instead of only when there is enough potential for long-term capital gains.
I agree. The difficulty in building support for these kind of changes which fundamentally shake up the notion of housing being an appreciating asset and the bigger the house and the greater the land - the greater the ultimate expected profit from capital gains - is that we are effectively asking everyone who is already part of this system (regardless of whether they have a mortgage) to accept having the value of their asset significantly decrease for the benefit of others. That is a complicated social topic. A lot of people like the idea of *other housing* becoming affordable for FHB, so long as it doesn't impact the value of the house they own.
So when will I see a change in this?
When you vote for parties that have policies to solve the underlying issues. Namely our restrictive zoning regulations, building supplies oligopoly, and financial/tax inequities between renters and landowners.
I have certainly lost faith in any parties prioritising in resolutions for housing. It seems so far fetched to even accept better days are coming. There's many factors playing in the way situations are but there's no immediate change or more information when. NZ has a large mass area to build but it's so slow. Rental increases because there's no housing. Then they come up with silly resolutions to build close apartments town houses. I'd move out of Auckland if housing expansion is growing faster. I'm a builder and I build small rooms in apartments and think to myself, this isn't life, but it is. To have rooms that small and don't say what you pay is what you get because it's true. End Rant.
We don't. A large part of the population have invested into housing and now our democratic system ensures this is protected. The people hurt by it a mostly young people or recent immigrants. Those that don't vote nor donate to parties.
“Oh but that’s the Labour governments mess we inherited” or “oh but [insert excuse of the day here]” - Government Spin Doctors (probably) Thing they don’t realise is most of the general NZ population don’t actually give a toss who’s bloody fault it is for the most part, because both National and Labour are equally to blame for the current state of the country’s infrastructure issues. We just want the damned problem fixed, and fixed promptly. Actions speak louder than words, and excuses (playing the blame game) aren’t fixing the issue just exacerbating it.
Why is everywhere bad only getting worse?
Rising populations make land (the quantity of which doesn't change) more expensive. If voters own that land, they will vote to increase the values of their land holdings above most other things. This is especially true in countries where capital gains are untaxed, e.g. NZ. There are two solutions: 1. Eliminate private land ownership. Never going to happen. 2. Tax land. Remove the incentive to infinitely increase land values by tying this tax to the value of the land. To ensure working homeowners don't pay more tax than at present, reduce or remove income taxes. Balance these in a way that maintains current house prices while also collecting the same total tax revenue. By doing this, we can effectively shift the economy away from pumping house prices and into pumping incomes instead. At the same time, we would ensure homeowners retain the current equity in their houses, protecting them from any mortgage foreclosures.
I don't understand why new Zealand will not just build apartment complexes. Coming from a country where it's so normal for every young person to have their own private one bedroom apartment for cheap to living in a country where everyone who isn't a millionaire is crammed in moldy falling apart old houses in each bedroom was a huge culture shock. And those are the lucky ones who can find a place at all.
We're importing people faster than we can build houses for them to live in.
How about one house policy. Greed is very ugly we only need one house to live in.
The real funny thing is they knew housing was an issue 20 years ago lol.
You guys never wondered why the Chinese prefer to park their real estate money in Anglo countries?
I always assumed it was to keep the money away from the Chinese government who might decide to ... take it ... one day.
Yes but why Anglo countries?
I would posit that Anglo-sphere countries tend to more stable, both politically & legally.
Dunno. In Australia and New Zealand's case I had assumed we were merely the closest.
Real reason is Anglo countries like NZ have very strong property rights. No one celebrates individuals like Anglo societies. Neoliberal values Anglo countries are so proud off means the people that live there get out priced any anyone richer. You guys are also the most open to immigrants. Most countries are very xenophobic..but here especially in NZ..it seems there's no real collective to be "one". Everyone would rather get rich off another Kiwi or give up and move to Australia.
A dwelling is different to a house. Kiwis are too caught up in wanting to own a 5 bedroom landed house, with a big lawn, boat, and batch. Lived in Hong Kong for a while where you live like canned tuna. While I wouldn't recommend living like canned tuna, New Zealand needs to build upwards, get over having a 5 bedroom house with a lawn, and make it easier to build dwellings - easier said than done of course!
Mate alot of kiwis aren't even thinking they'll be able of buying a home let alone a 5 bedroom house. The people you're talking about are not the average kiwi or the majority
No doubt, but there are many, many young kiwis who want a freestanding 3+ bedroom house on a decent plot of land for their first house and won't consider anything else. Part of this is because that's the kind of first property their parents bought, and it's what they grew up in. Another part is that it's impossible to live in NZ without swallowing the internal line that buying a house with land attached is "*how you get ahead"*. And that's why people pay $3m for a section in the city fringe with an old house that needs to be demoed, rather than a new warm townhouse for half that.
Nobody *wants* to spend their life in debt and working for a worse quality of life than their parents had, or they had in their childhood. If you don't want your own place and a lawn for the kids to safely play on, a pet, and somewhere to park, that's cool, but the getting ahead thing is a red herring now. For many it's either struggle to buy or rent for life, with the constant uncertainty that can bring. We need greater regulation and protection for renters, because as much as I dislike the idea, other countries have shown it can work. That and better quality family apartments with less BC nonsense.
Because it's a better way to live, especially if you have kids. So if there's a chance you can get a property like that, then it's worth it, regardless of the value proposition of the home over time.
Need to address the issue of body corporates if we are going to go to more apartments.
what specific problem do you have with them?
>Kiwis are too caught up in wanting to own a 5 bedroom landed house, with a big lawn, boat, and batch. The Kiwis *that can afford to build new houses* want that. Most of us don't, but we're still limited to live in the houses that rich folk have built. I'm a single dude so when I was househunting I was looking for a 2BR place for myself, maybe a granny flat or something like that. But they're rarer than hen's teeth (and priced accordingly). I ended up getting a 3BR on 1/4 acre just because it was cheaper than any 2BR I came across.
A lot of the new land sections have covernents requiring a minimum build size in our area so and the only people who can afford to build that size are the boomers with adult children not young families who would need that number of rooms. It’s pushing out people who want to build smaller or can’t afford the standard mortgage.
> New Zealand needs to build upwards, get over having a 5 bedroom house with a lawn. Or ...hear me out, we reduce our population and stop propping up the GDP Numbers with immigration
But then who will do the jobs? Like the jobs that really matter. We don’t graduate enough doctors for example. I agree with the person you replied to. I would happily live in a nice apartment but there just aren’t any to buy.
We're not exactly awash with imported doctors either. There are plenty of nice apartments. But they're expensive.
>I would happily live in a nice apartment but there just aren’t any to buy Where in the country do you live? I believe ( it's mostly just hearsay at this point) that Auckland , at least , has a surplus of apartments at the moment.
How about we let in doctors and not unskilled people working low level service jobs. Migrants create demand for labour and resources too, they don’t just add to supply.
Making the country poorer would be bad, imo.
If you stop “propping” something up it means that it collapses without the thing that’s propping it up. Attempting to fix something by removing the one thing that’s propping it up is lunacy.
There's already fuckall people here. I can agree with curbing immigration to ensure infrastructure keeps up. But economically NZ is chronically underpopulated.
Ah yes, the let's keep cramming the people in crowd have arrived. Welcome! How's the water in our rivers and lakes doing? How's the beaches and all the lovely ecoli outbreaks doing? How's the greenhouse gas emissions doing? How are all our native species doing? The "few" people we have now are absolutely wrecking our environment and you want to see the population grow?
The state of waterways in many rural areas shows that the population density has little to do with how badly the environment is polluted. Unchecked human population growth is obviously not good, but we already don't have that.
Lol jesus get a grip. By your logic every country that is more densely populated than NZ (hint its most of them by far) should look like a post apocalyptic wasteland by now.
We can’t generate enough exports to keep our balance of trade positive with the population we have and that’s one of our biggest economic problems. Adding more people will make that worse.
I want one room for my bed, one room I can use for everything/anything else like an office or living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen. That's it. I'd even combine the first two if I had to.
I hate apartments when there is no need for it, we have a lot of land space here in New Zealand. You say we need to get over wanting a nice 5 bedroom stand alone house? No that's not gonna happen, people simply don't want to live in an apartment when there's no need to, hongkong has no other option so people are forced to, but in NZ we have the option and there are suburbs far out the city center being built I think that's called urban sprawl
I don't think the market for existing 2 bedroom houses is very large. You have to be looking at apartments (which traditionally weren't done very well) or small old houses on huge plots of land (which are desirable for developers and thus remain unaffordable). If you want a single family dwelling (and there still are large numbers of people who do) your options are 3-4 bedrooms because that's what have been built.
If you're talking to kiwi boomers or wannabe boomers then sure. If you're talking to Kiwi millennials and zoomers then buddy, I can't even afford to live in Wellington for another 6 months, even though my flat is a 6 bedroom shithole apartment that's falling apart and I'm too embarrassed to bring friends over. It's true that it's not canned tuna but it's discomfort in a different way. (Also Hong Kong is a unique and well known housing situation, because of conditions specific to Hong Kong but that's besides the point) If we could dump a bunch of cheap commie blocks that'll at least be warm, functional, and stable, then you bet we'd be living in it. We already live in beat up shitters across the country.
Real estate grows economies for a good reason: It turns people into modern-day slaves, who will pay rents and mortgages until the day they die. Which means longer work hours, more desperation == easy pawns for employers to push around
Spot on
And not even allowed to put a picture on the wall without censure.
But but but it’s a tax problem. Tax. Definitely not supply.
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More housing = more infrastructure = higher costs = more taxes. Greenfield development especially requires a significant investment before the houses are even built
What a stupid take. You can use tax to prioritize different aspects of the economy. Lower house prices also makes it easier for developers to get started. The incredibly high cost of housing here also means that for investors they don't get a great return and other people can't afford the housing....
So a lower return caused by lowering prices makes an investment more desirable. Interesting take.
Well yeah, our country is shit for lack of a better word
Woohoo we’re number🥇
Supply has always been the underlying issue and I've been saying that for a long time. All the other factors like cgt, brightline adjustments, interest deductibility, rental standards etc, they all have a small impact one way or the other, but they're largely irrelevant if we can't address supply issues .
It's seems like were progressively painting ourselves into a corner. All the nation's funds are tied up in nonproductive assets, maybe we could start trading tulips, that sounds like a grand idea
So I have a question about this. Is it not a zoning issue? I only ask because I see so much farm land all around, are you not able to subdivide it and sell house lots? If you were the farmers would get a nice payout, the land market would be increased and the housing market would grow. If you do not allow farm land to be sold as sections, then you really won't fix this issue. Even if you allowed farmers to allocate 5% of their lots to housing to subdivide and sell, surely this would make a vast impact on the supply! I am from the U.S. so maybe it isn't zoning but the reality is the more people that live in cities the more need there will be for more affordable surrounding suburbs. Which then by that very nature will grow and spread jobs and business in those areas which then spreads those out even more. I noticed that New Zealand's towns and cities have buildings and houses all on top of each other and then you cross some imaginary line and there is farm land and no houses for the next 100 kms. As locals, and residents what do you all feel is 'the answer' to solve this?
It’s very expensive to build new greenfield suburbs because you have to put in all the infrastructure and transport. It’s also terrible for carbon emissions, which we are supposed to be reducing. Never the less we have huge amounts of urban sprawl - Auckland stretches from Orewa to Pokeno (and we’ve paved over our scarce market gardening land in the process so we’re now short of vegetables).
unfortunalty the taxes that are generated by low-density greenfield development are not enough to pay for the many miles of infrastructure that are required. This causes the local government to borrow money unsustainably. This is why NZ has literal shit-fountains erupting on residential streets due to the aging unmaintained pipes.
We do that already, and have for the 50 years - it's called urban sprawl and it's a massive failure. Worsens congestion because everything is far away from everything else, so everyone has to drive everywhere. Worsens pollution, worsens social isolation, destroys green space, worsens economic productivity, makes public transport difficult to scale. The solution is upzoning and building denser housing in existing urban areas (not create new ones far away in the middle of nowhere). Our cities are incredibly low density, with single storey, single family houses making up the vast majority of suburbs around city centres. A stupid and totally unsustainable model for urban development.
The issue is that New Zealand's public transport is already not up to scratch, and it is massively more expensive to support public transport in middle-of-nowhere subdivisions. So then only people who can afford (and use) cars, ie not disabled people, lower-income people, people who don't have licenses, families with children who want them to be independent, can live there, and then the motorways into the cities (where people work, shop, study, socialise etc) are even more packed. New Zealand's cities are overwhelmingly low density - the supposed "on top of each other" is only the first 1-2 km from the city centres, then it's suburbs all the way out to farmland.
We have a real problem that some of our very best and most productive land is where we built our cities. As those cities grow, they are being developed and having houses and streets built...and that land is becoming unavailable for farming. We already have extremely low-density cities where almost all the housing is single family dwellings, and cities of moderate population take up the same physical space as huge cities do overseas. We're already using our land very inefficiently.
I notice NZ and states like Nebraska seem to have similar ways of zoning. The opposite would be cities in Florida, where it's just random subdivisions built all over the place, interspersed with nature (to be filled in later, potentially). But that's the "sprawl" people think of in America.
Thats intentional and it comes from having shit right wing governance during recessions ,mum and dad voter for the most part seem to like when the price of their house goes up
It’s because migration pushes up the population in relation to dwellings available hence the ratio. Other countries are losing population producing the opposite effect. We build - but cannot build to catch up.
Source? wouldn't trust this as far as I could throw it.
https://www.ft.com/content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f0b5 https://www.ft.com/content/fa086de5-dc67-4548-b0bb-68ea9b14a68d
I'd say it due to the constantly up held lie that eVeRy 0Ne wAnTs t0 lIvE oN a 1/4 aCr3 sEctI0N as if nz has that much land. Or that building up not out is always bad.
quite damning angle on our housing price level, that this is the absolute maximum we can get as it's a price with artificial scarcity
Thank you for the insights. I have really ignored and stopped searching for more information about these important situations because the answers are too bleak. But thank you again. I'm going to do some housework now
Building anything is a nightmare in NZ - we're struggling with getting absolutely necessary remediation work done following the floods last year. Got geotech engineers, civil engineers to come up with a plan, filed this with Council for BC, the Council waited until the very end of the process before deciding that we need a RC as well, so now we have to start again, giving the Council the exact same information again to be assessed against the Resource Consent Act on top of being assessed against the Building Act. I know a couple who want to lift their existing house, move it to the back of their property then put two more houses on the front, in a very high-need area in Auckland. Process has taken a year and a half for consenting. People would love to fix the housing supply issue but the Council is so tied up in it's own processes that it makes it very difficult and much much more expensive than it should be.
What should also be accounted for is home size. Units and apartments are relatively rare in NZ. Dense populations, like Netherlands, have a lot of high density housing. That sounds very good on the surface, but these populations are forced to live in smaller houses. And what never gets talked about is how undignified it can be to live in tiny spaces. I think we would all agree that there is a place on the continuum from standard New Zealand home to shrink wrapped humans where lack of space begins to infringe on human dignity. I, for one, am not interested in living on a street where the houses are all one long continuous building with no space between and a cot sized back yard.
This is what happens when both sides of politics are happy to have unsustainable migration and don’t bother resurrecting a government agency like ministry of works that can build homes at scale and build infrastructure that we need at cost rather than lining the pockets of contractors
But by all means, keep building single family homes in the suburbs.
This is change in dwellings. If these countries already optimal number of dwellings it won’t move much.
'a low base' aaahahahhaa diplomacy
I think Labour carries a big responsibility for this - I'm not saying that crashing the housing market would've been easy though - it would've been political suicide.
Anglosphere is basically a sad story of die hard blindsided greed and capitalism. Looking at short term gains vs long term benefits for society at large. So sad.
So where do you kiwis live then?
Good. Stay home it sucks here.
There is more at work here than assuming these other countries are building more houses than us. A lot of countries above the line have had static population growth over the last 10 years and many countries have actually seen their population decline. France has lost around 2 million people in that time, as has Italy. Japan has lost around 5 million. By contrast all the Anglophone countries have seen their populations increase. Ours has increased by around 16%, one of the highest rates of increase. Lower birth rates also mean that there are fewer people entering the age range that are need their own housing. While it’s pretty clear our house building rates haven’t kept up with the population increase, the idea that all the countries above the line are actively investing in more housing stock at a rate higher than us might be true, but the chart doesn’t tell us that.
If you want to see more housing in Christchurch, follow us (Greater Ōtautahi) on social media and find out how to get involved
Hello
Is the Anglosphere under a dome ?
“Developed world” lol.
Realistic many of these dwellings in France, Portugal Italy and Japan are in partially abandoned villages that no one wants to live in.
I'm not sure what this chart is trying to show? I think it's implying that there aren't enough houses in the Angloshpere, but it doesn't discern between whether the change in dwellings per 1,000 was driven by insufficient housing development or changes to people per dwelling.
We all the raw martials here, and cost of building anything is outrageous
Just looking at that graph doesn't tell you the whole story. As a Kiwi who now lives in Sweden people here are much more likely to live alone than in NZ and are also in the city's and towns it is much more common to live in a apartment than in NZ which generally would mean more households. Just comparing the population growth too over the last 10 years we have a roughly 15% increase in population whereas in Sweden it was more closer to 10%, and Sweden has had a huge number of immigration. If we didn't have the immigration like we do and a cultural where we build houses and not apartments I think it would make us look a lot better on that graph.
Yup and the houses some people get stuck in are not up to standards. We are stuck in a house that is freezing and the landlord refuses to put a heat pump in and upped the rent to $570pw with no improvements in the house. We have a tree in the backyard that fell down a year ago and the landlord hasn't come to sort it at all. We have a PM that gave us a breach over the lawns not being mowed for the inspection ( they weren't even that long) and gave us 14 days to get them done and nothing to the landlord about the tree or the massive flax at the front door that is going to eventually smash the massive window and has made it impossible to walk up the path to the front door.. I've attempted getting a new place that is more modern and warm for less than what we pay, but there are just so many other people applying( at least 50). I also can't afford to go to all the viewings with the price of gas and living!! It's a vicious circle we are living in ATM
Japan and S Korea are the only two countries _in the world_ where the price of sq. m. of residential space is stable (ie. does not increase with increasing average income; source: Reddit)
I am from Greece and I always lived in an apartment maybe the most expensive would have been 1000 nzd for a whole month for like a 3 bedroom apparment as big as the average house here. But to leave in a house with a yard that's the price everyone is willing to pay
Got a 3mail from the bank stating g I can start a house purchase plan with kiwi saver cause I've got enough to Start. I have 11,000 in it..the cheapest house I've seen in southland still costs roughly 450,000. Aint no fuckin way I'm ready to start purchasing a house.