Meredith Akuhata Brown
Che Guevara said “Passion is needed for any great work, and for the revolution, passion and audacity are required in big doses.”
One issue I am passionate about is housing affordability, so this week I am heading to Auckland to share this passion with a few hundred others who are concerned about the housing crisis.
This past week I have met citizens facing the impacts of bureaucracy and the lack of options to meet basic housing needs. These are families that have been pushed from agency to agency and given directions that simply don’t fit their situation, or offer any real alternative to the challenges they are dealing with.
When I first began working in one neighbourhood of Kaiti we had over 20 empty homes. Most were state houses but there were also private rentals.
The availability and affordability of housing is a prevalent issue in New Zealand and a pressing concern for those on the lowest incomes. With properties now costing around 10 times the average income, the high cost of housing is a leading driver behind high levels of private debt.
Whilst there is consensus on the shortage of affordable homes in New Zealand, agreement about the causes of the crisis, let alone an integrated approach to fully explore and develop policies to improve the situation, is a long way off.
An inadequate supply of housing, along with the changing needs of families, mean the region’s residential property market requires sustainable housing options urgently. Growth in housing demand in the main centres could be used as a lever to encourage repopulation of the provinces, but all the political parties seem fixated on building more houses in Auckland instead of allowing the supposedly free market to balance demand with supply in the regions.
Of course there are few empty houses in Gisborne now but land prices are still a fraction of Auckland’s, which makes in-filling in the city a real option for first-home buyers.
Economist Shamubeel Eaqub recently discussed the idea of patrimony, a society where the surest path to homeownership is inheritance. In the absence of strong government action, hereditary bequests or financial help from parents may well become the path to homeownership. Such an inheritance-based class system goes against the grain of what New Zealand is supposed to aspire to: an equitable and egalitarian society.
This shift towards inequality and capital accumulation among the few is not unique to New Zealand.
Reforming the tax system is one solution, as is promoting relocation to more affordable regions to help reverse the trends of increasing urbanisation and depopulation in rural regions.
As a nation we have stood by and let housing become a privilege, not a right.
One solution that needs to be examined is wage increases. In 2013 the Council of Trade Unions found that if pay rates had kept up with productivity rates, the average wage would be $35.91 per hour not $26.70. A wage increase is one way to make the cost of housing more affordable and reduce growing inequalities between the landed classes and those without any hope of property ownership.
The complexity of this national crisis highlights the need for better engagement between government bodies, policy makers, developers, financiers and housing providers to meet the demand for affordable, well-designed quality homes.
The NZ Affordable Housing Development Summit 2017 is bringing key government figures and industry leaders together to explore strategies that advance affordable housing development. The summit will address policy issues, explore opportunities for growth and identify industry challenges for the government, private and community sectors. The passionate plea from many is “we need long-term solutions and we need them now”!