Dr Benno Blaschke: Stop counting houses. Start watching prices.

Housing targets have long been a political football – and an emotional subject. Would it not be better to take some of the heat out of the housing debate and ask more systematically how we could better plan for future housing supply?

The housing target for Auckland shrank twice in mere weeks as central government searched for a politically acceptable number. But planning-by-numbers is part of the problem.

Roger Partridge: The hidden reason houses cost too much

New Zealand’s housing crisis has causes everyone recognises – RMA restrictions, building consent delays, infrastructure that cannot keep pace with growth and building costs. All are real. But there is a deeper problem almost nobody mentions: for councils, population growth is an unwelcome burden.

Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour signalled last week that the 28 May Budget may finally begin to fix that. Speaking on Herald NOW, he indicated that councils may receive a share of GST from housing construction activity. It is a policy the New Zealand Initiative has been advocating for more than a decade. If it happens, the effects on housing supply and housing affordability will be profound.

Dr Bryce Wilkinson: Housing mess laid bare - mediocre Wellington does not know best

The Independent Review of Kāinga Ora – Homes and Communities lays bare New Zealand’s housing mess.

Decent housing is fundamental to wellbeing. Yet successive governments have created an artificial scarcity through restrictive land use policies.

Eric Crampton: On the housing crisis Labour and National need to grow up (and grow out)

Housing crisis makes growth all about ‘up-and-out’ not ‘up-or-out’

If you want affordable housing, it isn’t a choice between whether people should be able to build townhouses and apartments downtown or subdivisions at the city’s fringes.

Cities need to be able to grow in all directions, guided by where people want to live and the cost of providing infrastructure.

John Porter: When a Proposal Is a Fait Accompli

Today I’m talking about a subject a very large number of people are labelling “a fraudulent scheme of massive proportions being perpetrated on the people by this government, under the guise of increasing housing supply”.

One of the government’s solutions to the housing crisis is allowing higher-density building in city suburbs, and this has put them on a collision course with local councils. They are now faced with having to come down hard on recalcitrant councils if it wants them to toe the line.

Called the Resource Management (Enabling Housing and Other Matters) Amendment Act passed last year, this law requires Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Wellington, and Christchurch councils to adopt medium-density residential standards. The amendment DIRECTS councils over how this will be done.

Roger Partridge: A cunning plan

Like a slowly downloading webpage, is a whole-of-government strategy to solve the interminable housing crisis starting to take shape?

Recent reports predict house prices nationwide could fall from their late 2021 peaks by up to 20%. Not much compared with the massive increase in the median house price since the start of the pandemic. Or so you might think.

Cam Slater: The True Cost of Not Solving Homelessness

They’ve blown $788M shoving people into motels, in just over two years

When this Government was elected one of their main promises was to address and rectify the housing market, including solving the claimed homelessness crisis. What no one knew back then was what that actually entailed. But now we do.

The Government has hosed the thick end of a billion dollars down the grateful throats of several moteliers by shoving the homeless into motels.

Point of Order: The govt knocks down old state houses and builds new ones – but the net result is a waiting list that cries out for demolition

It was a simple question about housing and Point of Order listened closely to Housing Minister Megan Woods’ response.

Alas, we are none the wiser on one part of the question, about advice on how long it will take to get the waiting list down to around 5844. But – if we have done our sums correctly – we can tell readers there has been a hefty increase in the numbers of people on the state housing waiting list over the past five years.

We took a crack at working this out after Parliamentary questions were put by National MP Chris Bishop to the Associate Minister of Housing (Public Housing), who presumably was not in Parliament at the time. Megan Woods did the answering.

Bishop asked:

Mike's Minute: Will housing sink the government?

 

I just wonder if it might not be the complete and utter failure around emergency housing, social housing, or just housing in general that has finally got a bunch of the more apathetic among us sitting upright and paying attention at last.

The waiting list is at record levels, of course, and has been growing for the past several years. We are now spending $1 million a day on this mess with no sign it's getting any better.

This, after all, was the party that lambasted the last government and said they had answers. And they said motels were not an acceptable solution.

This week it appears, to some degree, to have come to a head.

Marama Davidson, one of the government's own, has told a sad and simple truth.

Kate Hawkesby: The housing announcement will not help renters

 

The housing announcement yesterday, apart from being a total broken promise from the government in terms of the bright line test, is essentially penalising mum and dad investors. And those are the investors running the rental homes providing tenants with much needed accommodation.

And the concern here is that the costs go up for those tenants, and that due to the government pinging them if they sell within 10 years, that landlords will hold onto rental properties for longer. And when they do that, you don’t get a cooler housing market, you get fewer houses up for grabs. What’s galling here is the brazenness with which this government has back tracked.

The Prime Minister campaigned on not introducing a Capital Gains Tax.. she was adamant, it was one of her biggest election promises. Not on her watch, she said. Grant Robertson is on the record ruling it out, saying it would never come to pass. And yet, here it is. A Capital Gains Tax in all but name.

Bob Edlin: What's happened to NZ's housing crisis?

The absence of emotive media reports and silence from the lobbyists does not mean the housing “crisis” has been fixed. 

So what happened to New Zealand’s housing “crisis”? Was it real, or just another imagined but emotive issue akin to “peak oil”, the fetish of the Green Party back at the turn of the century which was accompanied by grim forebodings that the world would run out of oil by 2006?

Surely it was not just a figment of our – or the public’s – imagination! After all, the media for months carried nightly images of the hundreds of homeless on the streets, people living in garages or – if they were lucky – people being accommodated at state expense in motels.

That was in the run-up to the general election.