“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.

Former Finance Minister Michael Cullen recently wrote an opinion piece on housing and monetary policy. To paraphrase him: the Reserve Bank are the Jedi Knights of the economy with interest-cutting lightsabers fighting against the evil empire of inflation. This worked when the problem was stagflation — high consumer price inflation and poor economic growth — but it is not working now when the problem is poor productivity, rising inequality and high house price inflation.

The Reserve Bank (RBNZ) has rejected Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s proposal for its monetary policy remit to consider house prices as well as its current inflation…

Executive Summary

Part One: Political Constraints

Part Two: Who are the Jedi Knights of Housing Affordability?

Part Three: Political Precommitment — Depoliticising Housing

Part Four: Is the Housing Crisis Bad for Productivity as well as Inequality?

Part Five: Housing as a Human Right — Restoring New Zealand’s Egalitarian Dream?

Further Reading

Feedback

Part One: Political Constraints

“We might make mistakes but we will make other things too”– Michael Joseph Savage

Renting in New Zealand is bad. The bottom 20 per cent of income earners spend a greater proportion of their income on rent than anywhere else in the OECD. For many decades New Zealand’s housing market has failed low-income earners due to rents inflating faster than wages.

Contents

Executive Summary

Why Adding Multimodal Transport to Urban Land-Use Models is Important

Underlying assumptions of the proposed multi modal land-use model

• Conceptual images of rapid transit effects on land use

Characteristics of Concentrated Urban Form

Characteristics of Dispersed Urban Form

Factors that help New Zealand make the most from the multi-modal land-use model

1. Spatial Planning
2. More Transit Hubs
3. More Organic Urban Growth
4. Allocate Scarce City Space More Efficiently
5. Remove Structural Bias Against Rapid Transit and Multi-Modal Transport
6. Promote an Urban Design Cultural Movement
7. Build Homes for the Full Housing Continuum

Appendix -Sufficient land pricing can pay for rapid transit

Executive Summary

This…

Philip George Hayward response to the paper High Land Prices: A Feature or a Bug?

High land prices because of value, is quite different to high land prices because of exploitation of powers to “gouge”.

Your history lesson is instructive as an example of an honorable government providing value; that is, they acted as land vendor in the process of “improving” the land with infrastructure and so on, paying for the improvements with the sale price.

The same is true of some governments at some times and places in history, and also true of private sector operators at some times…