Peter Williams: Building Consents and Immigration don't add up

The numbers say a disaster is looming

What sort of housing shortage and what sort of country are we looking towards if we marry up a couple of recent number sets from Stats NZ?

Last year the number of new homes consented for building dropped by a quarter.

The raw numbers were 49,538 in 2022 reducing to 37,239 in 2023.

Eric Crampton: Funding the future - The case for special purpose bonds

There are no silver bullets in housing and infrastructure policy. Too many separate problems compound, resulting in a severe housing shortage and some of the world’s least affordable housing.

But, to steal a line from Treasury principal economist and housing expert Chris Parker, there may be silver buckshot.

Point of Order: How the state went shopping in Austria to have 500 houses assembled in Titahi Bay in the 1950s

Readers who go wandering around the Titahi Bay area of Porirua may well stumble upon the consequences of the state acting both as land developer and builder of state-owned homes when the private sector failed to meet the demand for housing in the early 1950s.

In 1952 the then Minister of Housing, W.S.Goosman, approved 1000 prefabricated houses to be bought overseas.

Five hundred of the pre-fabricated dwellings came from Austria to meet state housing demand.

Eric Crampton: Beehive shouldn’t assume bigger is better for local government

An Infrastructure Commission report finds no evidence of economies of scale in council services and suggests countries do better when local councils have more, rather than less, responsibility for infrastructure provision, writes Dr Eric Crampton. So why centralise services like Three Waters?

In 2010, the National-led government launched a rather substantial experiment. Auckland City’s smaller councils were forced to amalgamate into a supercity structure.

The amalgamation was supposed to bring a lot of benefits, from transport coordination to improved efficiency. A Royal Commission had projected that reduced Council overheads could provide efficiency gains of $76–$113 million a year.

If it had, it would be worth knowing.