Kāpiti mayor K Gurunathan, left, with Michael Seymour.
In the last two weeks, I received three letters from people desperate for affordable accommodation.
The stories include the poor health status of family members, crammed conditions, increasing rental costs, and the long MSD waiting list for accommodation. It's the tip of the iceberg of a spiralling national crisis fuelled by a lack of housing supply, especially affordable stock.
Last week, Trade Me published its Property Price Index which became a lead media story for the Wellington region.
Demand for houses and land in Kāpiti had "skyrocketed", jumping 68 per cent from August last year with the average price increasing by 16 per cent to $685k. Media have noted it's the first time Kāpiti has registered the highest jump in the region.
There are a combination of reasons. Firstly, we have always known the Transmission Gully expressway will push growth on the coast. Secondly, this pressure has been turbo-charged by the collateral effects of Covid-19.
The requirements of isolation resulting in thousands of workers forced to work from home, made possible by the visionary investment of both the Labour and National governments in fast broadband technology connecting businesses and homes.
The availability of a digital highway enabled the digital shift in work culture during the lockdown. Suddenly, the fantastic lifestyle choice of living in, and holding down a Wellington job, on the Kāpiti Coast has become more realisable for young working families.
While the growth pressure pushing prices up in the face of a lack of supply may be good for the pockets of sellers and borrowing leveraging off this property value, it's not so good for buyers, especially for affordable accommodation.
Developers making bigger profit margins off high value development lack incentives to built 'affordable ' or social houses. The rental market will also get tougher.
The need in Kāpiti may not be as significant as other parts of NZ but Kāpiti still has pockets of high deprivation. Our ability to arrest central government attention to this problem has been hamstrung by a lack of evidential data.
MSD has a needs assessment based on its register of people reporting they are homeless or badly housed. In Kāpiti, they have generally registered around 140 such needs. But anecdotal accounts from NGOs estimate the actual need as more than 300.
The ability of council to politically rattle the cages of central government politicians and relevant government agencies is constrained by a lack of evidence-based needs assessment to back the NGO. In 2016, emergency workers attending a serious flood event in Ōtaki found two families living in crammed garages. They had never registered with MSD.
So, based on MSD's register, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development has ended up allocating only a limited number of affordable houses in Kāpiti. This is why investing in an evidence-based needs assessment is a priority.
The media article on the Trade Me Property Price Index also quoted real estate company Tall Poppy founder Michael Seymour. He noted the price of sections was going through the roof because of a limited supply.
He is right on the lack of supply but this is different from Kāpiti's actual capacity. The Government's legislated direction for councils under the NPS on Urban Development Capacity required local authorities to table long-term projections on the amount of residential and commercial zoned land. The projections show significant capacity to meet current and future residential and commercial development.
This Kāpiti data has, alongside the same data for each of the councils of the region, been used to develop the Wellington Region Growth Framework which is a spatial plan for the region. This Framework also shows significant growth capacity in Kāpiti.
The NPS on Urban Development recently passed by Parliament defines Kapiti as a Tier 1 growth area. This requires council to designate high density housing development around public transport nodes in Paraparaumu, Waikanae and Ōtaki.
These changes need to be secured in our District Plan. So anyone spreading misinformation that the airport land needs to be used for housing because of a lack of available land is talking a whole lot of crock.