No advice has been more "unwelcome" than housing affordability inquiries concluding that supply of greenfields land is the make-or-break factor. And it clearly is, it is a slam-dunk to show this from the evidence. We have a modern neo-pagan established religion that holds land itself as sacred as if we were Maoris to whom it is "Taonga". Labour even without the Greens, won't go against this belief. Even National, under John Key, lacked the spine to face the wrath of the clerisy on this - it is a tragedy for NZ that it didn't attend to this problem then, as it has only got so bad as to be of mind-boggling proportions. Michael Reddel said it precisely in 2016 (which was already terribly late)
"...There are no totally easy or fail-safe ways to unwind the disaster that the New Zealand – especially Auckland – housing market has become. But this is a clear example where the sooner it happens the better. If house prices rose sharply one day and were reversed the next, almost no one suffers. If prices rise sharply for six months and then fully reverse, a few people will have difficulty – but the losses will be isolated and limited, posing no sort of systemic threat. But if real house prices stay at current levels for the next 20 years, most of the housing stock will have been purchased (and borrowed against to finance) at today’s incredibly high prices..."
The arguments that urban sprawl has downside costs that exceed the benefit to the economy and society, from house prices being affordable by historic norms and remaining stable, are simply unreasonable. Simply pricing the externalities we are worried about, and leaving urban economies free of gouging economic rent in land, would be the rational way to go. Ironically, the cost of 'pricing" - taxes and fees - for infrastructure use and provision - might cause outrage. But costs of even greater magnitude for every new entrant to the market, buying or renting unaltered existing houses (and new vastly smaller and lower quality ones) does not seem to arouse the social conscience sufficiently to guarantee political action.
No advice has been more "unwelcome" than housing affordability inquiries concluding that supply of greenfields land is the make-or-break factor. And it clearly is, it is a slam-dunk to show this from the evidence. We have a modern neo-pagan established religion that holds land itself as sacred as if we were Maoris to whom it is "Taonga". Labour even without the Greens, won't go against this belief. Even National, under John Key, lacked the spine to face the wrath of the clerisy on this - it is a tragedy for NZ that it didn't attend to this problem then, as it has only got so bad as to be of mind-boggling proportions. Michael Reddel said it precisely in 2016 (which was already terribly late)
https://croakingcassandra.com/2016/07/28/a-couple-of-cartoons/
"...There are no totally easy or fail-safe ways to unwind the disaster that the New Zealand – especially Auckland – housing market has become. But this is a clear example where the sooner it happens the better. If house prices rose sharply one day and were reversed the next, almost no one suffers. If prices rise sharply for six months and then fully reverse, a few people will have difficulty – but the losses will be isolated and limited, posing no sort of systemic threat. But if real house prices stay at current levels for the next 20 years, most of the housing stock will have been purchased (and borrowed against to finance) at today’s incredibly high prices..."
The arguments that urban sprawl has downside costs that exceed the benefit to the economy and society, from house prices being affordable by historic norms and remaining stable, are simply unreasonable. Simply pricing the externalities we are worried about, and leaving urban economies free of gouging economic rent in land, would be the rational way to go. Ironically, the cost of 'pricing" - taxes and fees - for infrastructure use and provision - might cause outrage. But costs of even greater magnitude for every new entrant to the market, buying or renting unaltered existing houses (and new vastly smaller and lower quality ones) does not seem to arouse the social conscience sufficiently to guarantee political action.