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Building our future

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:00 pm, March 10th, 2011 - 69 comments

Facing a housing shortage in Auckland now and a massive rebuilding programme in Christchurch to come, the Government has announced the biggest public building initiative since World War 2. Thousands of unemployed young people will be paid to train as apprentices in building trades and contribute to their country’s future.

Cometh the Hour

Written By: Guest post - Date published: 9:19 pm, March 7th, 2011 - 53 comments

ChrisH submitted this incredibly knowledgeable and well-researched post on the rebuilding of Christchurch a few days ago. The announcement that large parts now lower-lying eastern suburbs will be abandoned lends more strength to his call for a visionary urban plan for the new, more resilient Christchurch. And Phil Goff has the history to present it.

Christchurch rentals

Written By: r0b - Date published: 7:01 am, March 3rd, 2011 - 47 comments

As the long haul gets under way in Christchurch there are going to be many flash points for conflict. One of the first to emerge is the tension between landlords and tenants, as the following selection of articles makes clear.

Kiwi dream RIP

Written By: r0b - Date published: 1:36 pm, February 7th, 2011 - 34 comments

Owning your own home was the foundation of the “Kiwi dream”. Now it seems that we’ve let that dream slip further out of reach than almost anywhere in the world. Houses in Auckland are less affordable than in New York. Demand in the rental market is far outstripping supply. What should the government be doing?

Overcrowding & undercrowding

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:20 pm, January 20th, 2011 - 33 comments

Overcrowding is a big problem that drives disease and prevents kids getting the best start in life. Normally, I would say that the solution to overcrowding is more state housing – eco-smart housing, which would also create jobs. But an interesting article in the Guardian recently by George Monbiot suggests another solution.

The widening gap

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:12 pm, January 10th, 2011 - 93 comments

No, this post isn’t about Smile and Wave’s failure to close the gap with Australia. It’s about the widening gap between the tiny elite in this country and the rest of us. Even before the Great Recession, 10% controlled more wealth than the rest of us combined. The housing market shows that their wealth is still rising while ours falls.

The new economy: Govt as an economic actor

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:00 am, December 17th, 2010 - 42 comments

Three government investment decisions in the last couple of weeks have shown the deficiencies in the neoliberal way of doing things. SOE Solid Energy’s lignite-to-liquids obsession, Kiwirail buying trains in China rather than making them itself and Steven Joyce decision to re-create Telecom’s monopoly by giving it 70-84% of the broadband contracts.

Wastewatch: Heatley spends $500K for nothing

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 8:54 am, December 10th, 2010 - 9 comments

The sum Phil Heatley has so far spent trying to get three women and their families evicted from their state houses, an effort to look tough, is the equivalent to the cost of building two new state houses. Over half a million spent on an ultimately pointless exercise – one that’s far from finished.

House prices show double-dip

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:00 pm, November 12th, 2010 - 14 comments

House prices are a good indication of how the economy is going. They rose rapidly in the 2000s, stalled in 2007, plummeted in 2008, and made a slight recovery in 2009. Now they’re heading down again. The median house price is over 16% below the peak in late 2007 and I reckon they’ve got a long down way to go yet.

Housing occupation not a stunt

Written By: r0b - Date published: 7:22 am, November 11th, 2010 - 116 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?

The State Housing review

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 10:35 am, October 26th, 2010 - 20 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.

The first diktats

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 8:07 am, September 21st, 2010 - 29 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.

Rob Stock calls for post-quake reforms

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:51 am, September 12th, 2010 - 18 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.”

Christchurch earthquake rebuilding: speed, not haste

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:18 am, September 12th, 2010 - 72 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?

Learning from the Christchurch Earthquake

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 1:39 pm, September 11th, 2010 - 21 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.

On the edge of a second recession, Greens have a plan, Nats don’t

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 10:31 am, September 3rd, 2010 - 53 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.

Jobless, Homeless, Clueless

Written By: Guest post - Date published: 1:40 pm, August 17th, 2010 - 25 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.

Heatley’s crocodile tears on state housing

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 1:51 pm, August 9th, 2010 - 17 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.

A new state housing agenda

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 2:31 pm, July 21st, 2010 - 35 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.

State housing decline will leave families out in the cold

Written By: all_your_base - Date published: 6:41 pm, July 7th, 2010 - 11 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 […]

Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?

Written By: Bunji - 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.”

Leaky homes

Written By: r0b - 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.

Who says tax swap boosts growth?

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:35 am, May 17th, 2010 - 33 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.

Renters will pay for Nats’ tax cuts for the rich

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:11 pm, May 16th, 2010 - 71 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.

John Carter: sleeper-agent for the Left?

Written By: Marty G - 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.

Free Market Failure

Written By: RedLogix - 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 – […]

Preserving your stake in NZ

Written By: Michael Foxglove - 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: […]

Don’t let State Houses become private slums

Written By: Marty G - 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 […]

Sell state houses? Not like this

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:42 am, September 16th, 2009 - 25 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 […]

Close the loopholes

Written By: Guest post - 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 […]

Welfare for whom?

Written By: Guest post - 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 […]