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As a homeowner, buy-to-rent investor, or property speculator, it is hard to see New Zealand's booming property market as anything but a positive development when looking through the prism of common sense. The latest round of data from QV show housing prices rose 10 per cent last year, not a bad return by any measure, but made even juicier once you factor in the tax free nature of the capital gains. Read more
Examining housing affordability in New Zealand can be an engrossing activity involving quantitative research, modelling and fact-based analysis. As such, it is easy to forget how emotionally appealing the cult of the compact city can be. Read more
Following on from last week’s piece The costs of corruption, this Monday saw the release of Transparency International’s ambitious and highly anticipated Integrity Plus 2013: National Integrity Systems assessment (NIS). The 374-page report provides detailed insights into the national “institutions, laws, procedures, practices and attitudes that encourage and support integrity in the exercise of power”. Read more
If there is any life left in one of the last demand boogeymen of the housing market, The Economist this week reminded us that there is a novel way of exorcising them, namely letting them in the front door. I am, of course, speaking of foreign buyers. Read more
Wellington (18 November 2013): The government needs to urgently restructure financial incentives for local councils, shift the burden of water infrastructure costs, and create competition in planning if it wants to deliver affordable homes, according to The New Zealand Initiative’s third housing report. The report, Free to Build: Restoring New Zealand’s Housing Affordability, is the third in a series which explores how the housing market has lost its affordability since the 1970s, and how other countries have maintained stable house prices over the same period. Read more
The argument that we need to build more homes to tackle the housing affordability crisis was underscored this week by reports that suggest loan-to-value ratio (LVR) restrictions are having unintended – and negative – effects on the housing market. According to the Registered Master Builders Association, the number of enquiries into new homes has fallen by 30 per cent since the Reserve Bank’s limit on how much money retail banks can lend on low-equity mortgages kicked in at the start of October. Read more
Fire the over-priced policy analysts, number crunchers and economics whizzes, because I’ve solved the housing affordability crisis. The solution is obvious: we need to ban home improvement shows. Read more
If New Zealand needed another timely reminder about the opportunity to sell our natural resources to the increasingly wealthy Chinese, it came this week from The Economist, which took note of the country’s water crisis. According to the magazine, water scarcity means the average person in China only uses about 400 cubic metres a year, approximately a quarter of what the average American uses, and well under the international definition of water stress. Read more
Wellington (2 October 2013): If the developed world is looking to put more power in the hands of people at a local government level, why is New Zealand headed in the other direction? According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 30 per cent of member state public spending is controlled by local government on average, but in New Zealand that figure stands at 11 per cent. Read more
It’s time we asked the fundamental question. Can we have strong local economies and vigorous communities when so much public decision-making is made by central government in Wellington? Read more