Public housing delivers healthier, more stable lives, and Aotearoa needs more of it, not less, writes Philippa Howden-Chapman. Photo / 123RF
Public housing delivers healthier, more stable lives, and Aotearoa needs more of it, not less, writes Philippa Howden-Chapman. Photo / 123RF
THE FACTS
Aotearoa has a low percentage of public housing when compared with similar countries.
More than 25,000 children are hospitalised annually with preventable housing-related conditions.
The NZ Initiative has proposed shaking up Kāinga Ora’s role and issuing housing vouchers.
Few developers in the private sector build affordable, healthy houses, since they are understandably less profitable than top-end houses. New houses are rarely let, and private rental houses are usually older and in poorer condition.
The market gap creates a health toll: more than 25,000 NZ childrenare hospitalised annually with preventable housing-related conditions. Māori and Pasifika children are particularly at risk, and many of them live in private rentals.
There is already an acute shortage of public and community housing, which is leading to a distressing increase in men and women who are homeless and living on the streets or in cars. Aotearoa has one of the lowest percentages of public and community housing in the OECD. The percentage of household income spent on rental housing by tenants in the lowest income quintile is also among the highest in the OECD.
Building at scale to meet housing need is important. In 2024, Kāinga Ora-Homes and Communities let 75,000 homes, and community housing providers let 26,000. This is about 4% of the housing stock, well under the OECD median of 6-7%. On the 2023 Census night, 112,000 people were housing-deprived and 5000 were without shelter.
Yet Bryce Wilkinson and the NZ Initiative, without supporting evidence, are restating tired ideological arguments. In a Herald opinion article on October 16, Wilkinson asks whether the state should own social housing, and says that “the market will deliver”.
Kāinga Ora currently manages around 75,000 homes nationwide. Photo / Mike Scott
The NZ Initiative proposes to substantially diminish the role of Kāinga Ora-Homes and Communities. The previous National Government took similar aim at Housing NZ in the 2010 report Home and Housed on the spurious basis that HNZ was a monopoly and there was no need for the state to own housing assets.
Despite the evidence of the shortage of supply of affordable housing for those on low incomes, the latest NZ Initiative report proposes that the answer should be a voucher – a welfare subsidy like the Accommodation Supplement (AS). The AS is demand-driven, available for funding mortgages as well as rents, and is NZ’s most expensive welfare programme after National Superannuation. It does not add to the affordable housing supply.
There are also problems with the AS, which is based on the US Voucher 8 programme. In the US, it has been definitely shown to lead to poorer outcomes than for those housed in stable “project housing”, equivalent to our public housing.
In New Zealand, the Treasury has indicated that a substantial part of the benefit of the AS goes to landlords. Moreover, in the US, before a rental property is approved for a Voucher 8 for tenants, there has to be an inspection by environmental health officers to ensure the property is up to the equivalent of our Healthy Home Standards. But there is no equivalent proactive enforcement of housing quality regulations in NZ; any redress is retrospective and usually has to be instigated by tenants, who risk unlawful retaliatory eviction.
A more credible political economy argument in Aotearoa is that central government and local government, and to a lesser extent community housing providers, have the incentives, ability and patient capital to build at scale across the country. Good-quality public and social housing is a recognised asset, currently for Kāinga Ora about $48 billion, which can underpin other public investments (such as in schooling).
The state also has the tools to identify where there is a severe shortage of houses and build there; and to build to standards above the bare Building Code minimum (again, one of the lowest in the OECD).
There is evidence that well-built and designed public and community houses require less maintenance and last longer. Crucially, they can also contribute to reducing carbon emissions compared to other housing; where they are carefully located close to amenities and public transport, tenants emit only half the per-person transport emissions of other households.
The NZ Initiative report also calls for the sale of “under-utilised” Kāinga Ora land, which was carefully decontaminated and provided with up-to-date infrastructure, and in many cases already has planning and building consents. The land is only “under-utilised” because the coalition Government blocked Kāinga Ora from being a developer from mid-2025 and is requiring the sale of the land, probably at a loss, to the benefit of private developers.
Kāinga Ora has already been required to break existing contracts with private construction firms. So, rather than acting as a positive counter-cyclical institution in the economy, it will accentuate the recession. Its close collaboration with community housing providers, for whom it built supported housing at scale, was broken when Kāinga Ora ceased being a developer.
Only around 4% of New Zealand’s housing stock is public or community housing. Photo / Getty Images
Putting aside ideology, the MBIE-funded research programme, Public Housing and Urban Regeneration - Maximising Wellbeing, has conclusively shown that people living in stable and affordable public and community housing have better wellbeing and health, fewer hospitalisations and mental health issues, and that children are more likely to take all levels of NCEA exams.
