Written By: - Date published: 7:22 am, November 11th, 2010 - 107 comments
Matt McCarten and his team took over a vacant state house in Mana to install a young couple who were previously living in a garage. Four supporters were soon arrested. The media are calling this action a “stunt”. To do so is to diminish the significance of the issue to which it was drawing attention. Call it a protest. People are living in squalor while state houses sit empty. Why?
Written By: - Date published: 10:35 am, October 26th, 2010 - 18 comments
It’s not surprising that the Housing Shareholders Advisory Group came to the conclusions it did. Despite its name, the group included no state house tenants. It was a group packed with private social housing providers, hand-picked to deliver the conclusion that these groups should be given control of state houses.
Written By: - Date published: 8:07 am, September 21st, 2010 - 26 comments
On Thursday, our new dictator Gerry Brownlee decreed by Order in Council that the following Acts of Parliament were amended: the Building Act, the Local Government Act, the Resource Management Act, various pieces of transport legislation, and the Civil Defence Act. Most of the changes deal with minutiae of government. Some are less innocuous.
Written By: - Date published: 11:51 am, September 12th, 2010 - 17 comments
In today’s, Sunday-Star Times, Rob Stock picks up on a topic I’ve been writing about: “THE EARTHQUAKE has exposed a policy that must be changed immediately – the way the Earthquake Commission is funded.Significant numbers of people will get nothing from the commission because it is funded by a levy on house insurance.”
Written By: - Date published: 9:18 am, September 12th, 2010 - 71 comments
The Government has announced it intends to push through emergency legislation to expedite the rebuilding of Christchurch. The urge to put things back the way they were is only natural in the wake of a huge physical and psychic shock but shouldn’t we have a think about how we want Christchurch rebuilt before we let anyone go ahead willy-nilly?
Written By: - Date published: 1:39 pm, September 11th, 2010 - 20 comments
The Napier Earthquake led to the earthquake-resistant building standards that have proven so valuable in Christchurch. The EQC was founded after the Wairarapa Earthquake. World War 2 and the threat of air raids led to the creation of Civil Defence. What lessons can we learn from the Christchurch Earthquake? Better standards building on around liquefaction-prone ground seems like a priority.
Written By: - Date published: 10:31 am, September 3rd, 2010 - 48 comments
20,000 more Kiwis’ jobs are at risk as commercial building construction grinds to a halt. The Greens have a plan to divert money from low-quality spending on motorways to high benefit to cost spending on housing that will save those jobs and give Kiwi families a better standard of living. That’s the kind of visionary economic leadership we need. We’re not going to get it from National.
Written By: - Date published: 1:40 pm, August 17th, 2010 - 24 comments
In the last seven days a triple-conjunction of political portents has publicly demonstrated just how bankrupt of imagination and policy this current government truly is. The lack of direction and paucity of creative ideas is breath-taking. A “caretaker-government” would be a polite euphemism in this context.
Written By: - Date published: 1:51 pm, August 9th, 2010 - 15 comments
Phil Heatley says he fears for the future of state housing. I can’t help but agree, but the problem is that it is Heatley and his government that are making the future of state housing so dire. They have cancelled investment in new state houses and declared the existing stock for sale. Now, Heatley has to cheek to say the charitable sector will have to step in where his government is failing.
Written By: - Date published: 2:31 pm, July 21st, 2010 - 34 comments
The country is short about 10,000 houses and many of the houses we do have (mostly privately owned rentals) are unhealthy. The housing shortage was a driver of the last housing boom and is still keeping house prices excessively high, while poor quality housing means higher health costs, more sick days, and kids that are sick so often it disrupts their education. It would be sensible on every level to build the extra houses we need, and the government should take the lead role.
Written By: - Date published: 6:41 pm, July 7th, 2010 - 3 comments
Stuff reports that under Minister Phil Heatley, Housing NZ will manage additions of only 275 houses for each of the next two years. Under the previous government 8000 state houses were added between 1999 and 2008. In a recession, with household budgets stretched, state provision of high quality, affordable housing is even more important for …
Written By: - Date published: 10:20 am, June 8th, 2010 - 24 comments
According to a new report: “New Zealand is a great place for children if their parents have a good income, live in a warm dry house and are well educated.” However if you’re not born into a privileged household, then death and disease “is worse than that of all but two [developed] countries, Mexico and Turkey.”
Written By: - Date published: 1:10 pm, May 26th, 2010 - 44 comments
While it rains, thousands of homes are rotting, a legacy of the stupid deregulation of the building industry by National in the 1990s. The current government is proposing that huge costs be passed on to ratepayers, and tonight Wellington City Council votes on the plan. There are no good solutions to this mess.
Written By: - Date published: 11:35 am, May 17th, 2010 - 32 comments
There are several myths about the coming tax swap that have a surprising amount of currency. The biggest is that this tax swap will boost growth. It won’t and the Tax Working Group never said it would. What it will do is increase inequality with massive tax cuts for the elite funded by higher GST and rents for working Kiwis. That’s not by accident or inevitable – it’s by design.
Written By: - Date published: 11:11 pm, May 16th, 2010 - 70 comments
The tax changes that will soon be announced are characterised even by the Government as a ‘tax swap’. They are fiscally neutral. The tax burden will not fall. All that will change is who it will fall on. Most people end up neutral or slightly worse off from the GST and income tax changes. The rich get huge cuts, which renters will end up paying for. Who are the renters? The census tells us.
Written By: - Date published: 10:04 pm, April 12th, 2010 - 20 comments
How dumb was John Carter to use his speech at the Grey Power National Conference to have a cry because Grey Power’s participating in an inquiry into aged care by Labour, the Greens, and the Progressives? You don’t try to bully Grey Power with its 100,000 members. The grey voters will be leaving National in droves.
Written By: - Date published: 9:38 am, February 27th, 2010 - 56 comments
It’s time for the National Party to issue an abject apology to the nation… for the 1992 Building Regulations that directly led to the astounding public crisis we now face. Building and Construction Minister Maurice Williamson told the Weekend Herald the official $11 billion figure – which experts believe is half the true cost – …
Written By: - Date published: 12:05 pm, November 4th, 2009 - 64 comments
As Marty G has pointed out Bill English is looking into killing the tax advantages for investing in housing. Good. But it’s not nearly enough. Every person in New Zealand should have the right to exist somewhere without having to pay for it. And yet as the Herald reports today, house prices continue to increase: …
Written By: - Date published: 12:30 pm, October 16th, 2009 - 2 comments
The other day on Red Alert, Chris Hipkins related an interesting story about how National’s last round of State House sales went awry: Recently I went to visit a state house tenant in their home to talk about some problems they had been having with Housing New Zealand. They wanted their home heating and insulation …
Written By: - Date published: 9:42 am, September 16th, 2009 - 23 comments
National has announced that it will begin offering to sell 3,800 state houses to tenants living in them on market rents. I don’t automatically oppose selling state houses but there needs to be four conditions: Housing NZ must use all revenue from sales to buy new houses – we don’t want the amount of housing …
Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, September 14th, 2009 - 30 comments
I am heartened that Phil Goff is trying to work with the Government to address over-investment in residential property. However, I think a capital gains tax is the wrong way to go about it. In my view, the rush to get on the rental property bandwagon is the single biggest problem facing the New Zealand …
Written By: - Date published: 9:28 am, September 11th, 2009 - 61 comments
Remember the iconic photos of the first Labour Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage and his cabinet celebrating the introduction of State Housing by carrying furniture into the first home at 12 Fife Lane, Miramar? State housing in New Zealand was set up to provide relief for low income tenants, from insecurity and rack renting by …
Written By: - Date published: 6:42 pm, September 10th, 2009 - 45 comments
More questions about English’s ministerial housing allowance rort in the House today: Key wasn’t in the House to answer the questions and normally English would have answered on his behalf but, instead, National pulled one of it’s favourite tricks - using the Government’s power to assign questions to an idiot who didn’t know the answers (Brownlee) rather …
Written By: - Date published: 5:54 am, September 9th, 2009 - 12 comments
As I alluded to yesterday, the claims from John Key that he has slashed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the cost of ministerial housing are rubbish. The media did a pretty good job of exposing the lie (except TV3 who just had some junior reporter toeing Key’s line). Here’s how it works. Ministerial services …
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, September 8th, 2009 - 46 comments
And by any other name it smells as bad. John Key has annouced a reform of the rules for ministerial accommodation allowance. A fixed, automatic allowance will now be paid to all out of Wellington ministers of $37,500 a year for their Wellington accomodation (or $30,000 if they own the house), slightly less than the highest spending ministers …
Written By: - Date published: 8:05 am, August 31st, 2009 - 38 comments
Why are house prices rising at the same time as mortgagee sales are hitting record highs? More people than ever are unable to meet their mortgage, and a growing proportion of them owned only a single home. It’s not just speculators losing their shirts. With so many people losing their jobs and few people getting payrises …
Written By: - Date published: 8:45 am, August 27th, 2009 - 26 comments
The real estate agencies and the newspapers, both of which have an interest in a booming property market, are predicting that housing prices will surge over the next three years. Apparently, houses will go up 11% this coming year and 24% over the next three years. Let’s have a look at what that looks like, once inflation …
Written By: - Date published: 12:56 pm, August 13th, 2009 - 18 comments
It’s a rare day that I agree with Bill English but he’s right about the danger of another housing boom. The last bubble has not deflated yet we are already seeing prices start to grow again. There are now projections of 24% growth housing prices over the next three years, in a period when GDP …
Written By: - Date published: 7:44 am, August 4th, 2009 - 48 comments
One of these things is not like the other One of these things is not quite the same. Can you guess which one is not like the other Can you tell me before I finish the game?
Written By: - Date published: 1:29 pm, July 26th, 2009 - 7 comments
Exiled Online, a US site, has excellent coverage of the recession and the sub-prime crisis from a ground-level view. Yasha Levine moved to Victorville an ‘exurb’ of LA (100 miles from LA centre) to experience the crisis first-hand. His reports are a must read – well written, well researched, hard hitting (hope you’re not too …
Written By: - Date published: 5:21 am, July 7th, 2009 - 14 comments
There’s a lot of empty, over-optimistic talk around at the moment about ‘green-shoots’ in the economy. Supposedly, these are little early signs of recovery which mean that soon everything will be back to normal and we can go back to getting rich selling each other houses with money we borrowed from the Japanese. Things will get …
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