It’s great to see the Greens’ new housing policy nicely complementing Labour’s affordable housing policy.
Labour’s policy would get a lot of middle-income people into homes, and reduce the costs for medium-to-lower-priced homes generally by greatly increasing the supply (prices in Herne Bay will probably be unaffected…). With Labour still intending to noticeably increase State Housing numbers (as we do each time we get into government, before National then stops building / sells off), and looking to increase rental standards, renters were being catered for; but we are still working on ideas for poorer people to get to own houses.
And the Greens’ policy looks great. The devil is in the detail, obviously, but from a first look it should help bridge that gap.
And it once again shows up the paucity of ideas National has. Housing affordability is one of Aotearoa’s crises. And – like Child Poverty, or creating jobs for Kiwis – National seem to only draw blanks.
So far all we’ve had is Bill English abusing councils for not committing to urban sprawl enough (as in Demographia’s study introduction). By which he really meant Auckland… Which has more than 20,000 properties ready to build, if they could get developers moving. Auckland Transport Blog covers Does Auckland really have a land shortage well. As they demolish the study somewhat well too… No thought to costs of added infrastructure or transport, or why prices are so high centrally (maybe because people don’t want to live miles from their work?)
So no solutions there. Looks like we need a Labour-Green government…
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