Sell state houses? Not like this

• Marty G
• 15 years ago
• Categories: housing
• Tags: state housing

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 available for the most needy decreasing.
• It must not sell all the houses in wealthy areas only to construct state house only neighbourhoods – the poor and the wealthy should not be physically separated by government policy.
• The houses must only be bought by their current tenants – we don’t want them claimed by wealthy investors, locking out the poor.
• There must be a caveat on the titles to the properties preventing them being rented out by a private landlord – that way they can’t be bought out by property investors as happened in the 1990s.

Put together, these measures would help the houses stay in the hands of those on low incomes, keep the houses cheap because the price wouldn’t be dragged up wealthy people buying to be landlords, boost home ownership rates, and create a bigger pool of cheap housing.

It seems that National has only put one of these in place, the third. That’s just going to see the houses on-sold to investors. As in the 1990s (and the 1950s when National first started selling state houses), the former state houses will end up being rented out at more expensive rents.

Under National’s policy, there will be a greater concentration of the private housing stock in fewer hands and a smaller pool of cheap housing. But of course, that’s the whole point.