The planet is on fire. Humanity is responding — hopefully fast enough

Europe’s coal and steel union evolved into the European Union. Which is now evolving into an environmental union that intends to tax imported carbon. Such a tax would make exporters to the EU pay more for goods like steel and cement.

The global warming threat to humanity and the international response has significant implications for New Zealand. The country should carefully consider its position.

Australia is attacking the EU plan, if the US follows the EU lead, then Australia will eventually follow too.

It is not in New…

The point of incremental change is to grease the machine to make a more efficient model.

In contrast radical change requires governments to move past current practice to create an entirely new system better suited to the obstacles presented.

As my family and friends know, I am more than a little obsessed about housing. I believe, and have done for a long time now, that our cities and towns are profoundly broken. The poor way New Zealand manages the built environment risks making the housing crisis an obstacle that might prove insurmountable. …

“Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as the destination.” Paul Goldberger

Auckland Light Rail so far has been an unhappy initiative — it has been delayed by three years and the project is now on its second Minister.

Michael Wood the new Transport Minister has created a new light rail process with public engagement at its core. There will be a six-month work programme undertaken by an Establishment Unit. At the end of the year when the Government receives advice from the Unit, it will make the key decisions on route, mode, and delivery entity.

So, now…

“We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us” Winston Churchill

Renting in New Zealand is bad — is how I have written about housing in the last few months. Nobody disputes the narrative. New Zealand’s housing market has become so farcical it is an object of satire. Getting on the property ladder is like joining the landed gentry class in a Jane Austin novel, and mocked for it — Pride and Property, an Austentatious tale.

These kinds of stories cast landlords as a villain in the nation’s story. There is a legitimate beef too — landlords did not pass on…

“While Adam delved (dug) and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?” — John Ball priest — hung, drawn and quartered, 1381.

There was no privileged landed gentry in Adam and Eve’s time so why are they favoured in later times?

New Zealand is bad at housing its people — very bad. Relative to income, homes in the country are among the most expensive in the world.

(H/T Sophie McInnes for suggesting the title — it is a big improvement)

Post-quake development in East Christchurch remains a difficult question. Greater Christchurch is at the stage where it needs mass transit to shape its spatial growth pattern. There have been several suggestions for this, such as the below ‘Hand Plan’. However, it has been difficult to incorporate the East into these plans due to the effects of the 2010/11 earthquakes, which caused it to lose houses and population. Add in concerns about liquefaction and sea level rise and it becomes hard to justify large-scale public investment.

People might vote with their feet

The first three parts of The New Zealand Rack-Rent Housing Crisis series focused on housing inequality, an issue that feeds into and underpins numerous societal ills. Bold political action is needed to make housing affordable and prevent the entrenchment of New Zealand society into a class system based around inherited property wealth. This paper though focuses on productivity.

Jenée Tibshraeny, a journalist at interest.co.nz, has done excellent work investigating the inequality effect of printing money, a strategy employed by the Reserve Bank in response to the forecast economic downturn associated with Covid-19 (articles here…

The end of the John Key government was marked by a desperate scramble to reverse housing policy settings. Media reports showing homeless families living in cars shocked the nation. As a stop-gap measure, the homeless were housed in motels. The former prime minister was forced to contend with the consequences of his earlier housing attention being focused on middle-income earners and his assumption that building social housing was economic vandalism, when in fact housing as a human right was the political necessity.