Well, you have to hand it to New Zealand, where politicians sure know how to stage an affordable housing shipwreck.
Kiwibuild! Such warm nation-embracing star power in the name! Such promise!
Such non-delivery.
From the very start, paper housing exploded like a confetti-cannon from the government mouth. 10,000 affordable houses a year for a decade!
Among other things, however it was soon pointed out that the entire nation’s homebuilding capacity, applied solely to the job, couldn’t handle the numbers, even if the entire private homebuilding industry was bent to the government will. For a survey of few of the early rocks struck by the launching of Kiwibuild, try: New Zealand’s Kiwibuild ‘Affordable’ Housing Stumbles Out Of The Starting Gate
Then there was startling news that the lucky occupants of the first completed home were a doctor and a marketer. It was not just the foreign press, remote from the nitty gritty, who were caught by surprise. Many locals were astonished, not having really grasped the fine print details about ‘affordable.’ Kiwibuild was not about (you should have realized) truly affordable housing, it was affordable housing for the middle classes who could not otherwise afford to climb aboard the housing ladder.
Truly affordable housing was being dealt with by some other government bureaucratic process, which nobody had noticed, probably because after all, workers with low incomes do not deserve sexy names like KIWIBUILD to headline the grudging construction of their squalid little rental homes. For more on some of the ‘affordability for doctors’ fuss, try: The Lightbulbs Go On In New Zealand: Oh . . . You Mean THAT Kind Of Affordable Housing
And so the good ship Kiwibuild has steamed on from rock to reef.
More recently, it seems that Kiwibuild owners would be constrained from renting out their houses. But then it seemed that renting was fine, just so long as the government could share the income.
And as for property flipping for profit? No, never, not allowed! Well . . . not for a year or two at least.
Latest revelations?
With the first 1000 houses due for delivery by July 2019, is the construction schedule keeping up? How does 33 houses completed sound? Not particularly impressive apparently, even to Kiwibuild’s political masters. Read more on this latest shoal (as well as useful links to earlier ones) at Newshub: Housing Minister Phil Twyford admits he can’t deliver on KiwiBuild promise
