Shamubeel Eaqub is a migrant to New Zealand. He loves this country and wants to stay here but that resolve is tested by Government failure to deal with growing problems in housing and transport in Auckland.
He points out in his book, Generation Rent, that for many migrants and other New Zealanders, the dream of home ownership has been stolen from them.
Of Aucklanders over the age of 15, 57 percent now live in rented rather than owned accommodation. Mostly that’s not a matter of choice but because of unaffordability.
First-home buyers haven’t been able to keep up with rapidly rising house prices up by $100,000 (19 percent) in Auckland just in the last year alone.
Sadly too little has been done to address the problem and houses in Auckland are now less affordable than in cities like Toronto, Los Angeles and New York.
The reason that prices have gone up so dramatically is because the supply of houses hasn’t kept up with rapidly rising demand in Auckland. Over the next 10 years, Auckland’s population will grow by over 250,000. We need to be building an extra 13,000 houses a year. That’s not impossible.
Back in the early 2000s, under Labour we were building over 12,000 houses a year in Auckland. But by 2010-12, that number had fallen to around 3500. Even now, new houses numbers have recovered to only 8000 a year. That means that we’ve built up a shortfall of nearly 30,000 houses.The government has not responded effectively to this problem. First, they denied the crisis. Then they sought to blame everybody but themselves. Realising that this wasn’t working, the Government is now frantically trying to demonstrate that it’s finally doing something. However, that has turned into a total fiasco.
Sadly for him, Housing Minister Nick Smith’s attempted photo-opportunities have backfired. He claimed that the Government was freeing up 500 hectares of public land for building.But as it turned out, some of the properties he showed to the media on a PR bus tour didn’t even belong to the Government or had been promised to iwi. Other land turned out to be electricity substations and cemeteries.
When questioned about whether Mr Smith’s policies were working and whether he had confidence in him, Mr Key said that Mr Smith was “doing his best”. Then it got worse. He said that the land promised by Mr Smith was “conceptual”.
People can’t live in conceptual houses. We need the Government to bring in policies, as governments have done in the past, which promote growth in housing to meet demand.
We need to restore the Kiwi dream of being able to own your own house. The Government needs to work with the private sector to ensure that land, building materials and skilled labour are available to lift our building output. It needs to build confidence in the industry to gear up to build more homes by standing behind a programme to help first-home buyers to move into their own homes. Labour governments have done this time & again in the past. We will back National if it does the right thing. Sadly, all we’ve seen so far is the Smith fiasco & a lack of any genuine effort to solve the housing crisis.