Kerre McIvor: City life not all roses

Even a humble dwelling costs a fortune in Auckland. Photo / Michael Craig

I love our little house. It's the only one I've ever owned and it was the sort of house I dreamed of living in one day - a 19th-century wooden cottage with a veranda out the front and roses in the garden.

My poor Dad would be turning in his grave if he could see where we are. He grew up poor as a church mouse in a series of rotting, mouldy, dilapidated old cottages until his family was assigned a state house.

Consequently, when it came to buying the family home, he couldn't see past brick-and-tile and he thought aluminium joinery was brilliant.

His kids weren't going to shiver in their beds as the wind blew through dodgy sash windows.

We weren't going to suffer the ignominy of falling through a rotten veranda as he had done in a St Asaph St dump.

For years, my brother and I thought "Sanasafstreet" was one word. Dad used it often in sentences when he wanted to contrast the misery of his youth with the unadulterated luxury and comfort of ours, a comfort we didn't properly appreciate.

I grew up with a lasting gratitude to my Dad for the sacrifices he made, but a loathing of aluminium joinery and a yearning for a little wooden cottage. And now we have it.

Although if we were trying to buy it at today's prices, we'd be stuffed.

Fourteen years ago, it would have taken 3 years of our total income to buy this wee place.

Today, we would need 12 years of our total income to buy it. That's a huge increase - and the place is nothing flash.

It's not a villa. It's just a little old workman's cottage. If it were in Waipukurau you could get it for a sixth of the price we could sell it for in Auckland.

Madness.

There has been even more talk about the overheated housing market since David Shearer went all Winstonian on it and announced last week that Labour would not allow overseas investors to buy houses in this country unless they were resident here.

I know Labour needs to do something to get some traction in the polls, but I hope this is not the start of borrowing New Zealand First policies and trying them on for size.

If Shearer starts wearing three-piece suits and snappy ties, somebody will have to stage an intervention.

Nobody knows how many overseas investors are buying New Zealand homes.

Some suggest it's about 6 per cent.

Although I don't think anyone should be allowed to buy here unless they want to be a part of this country, the overseas investors aren't the reason why young Kiwis are finding it so hard to get a foot on the property ladder.

It's far more complex than that.

I would love to live out of Auckland. Every time I visit a provincial town or city, I'm auditioning it as the place I will run to when I can finally leave Auckland.

Not that I don't love the city. I do. I just prefer the pace of smaller towns.

However, until my husband and I can find work in other regions we're stuck in Auckland.

The provinces might moan that exorbitant housing prices is just an Auckland thing, and they're right. But until there are more jobs in their towns, people won't be attracted outside the main centres.

There's also the psyche of wanting to own the quarter-acre pavlova paradise. I'm as guilty as the next Kiwi - I didn't want to live in an apartment. I never will unless developers start building something more than the soulless, relentlessly ugly pieces that are a blight on our city skyline.

Where is the bylaw that says any apartment building has to be devoid of any architectural merit? It must be there somewhere, otherwise how can we explain the hideousness of recent apartment buildings.

Then there's the council red tape that ties developers up in knots and there's also the lack of land on which developers can build new homes.

Combine that with young buyers not wanting to live in the modern day equivalent of Sanasafstreet and you have a problem.

Pragmatists - practical people with painting and papering skills; people who can find jobs in the provinces - will be sweet. The rest of the first-time home buyers will be leaning on mum and dad, heading for Australia, or buying a home out of Auckland and trying to sell the concept of NoHu - North of Huntly.