NZ: Less Government Self-Puffed, So-Called Housing Solutions, Please.

abandoned blue house with red roof in the midst of high rise buildings on a steep street in Aukland, New Zealand
Derelict building providing informal housing for people who are homeless in Auckland, New Zealand. It seems destined to continue in this role.

Governments around the world have, for the last few decades, abandoned social housing as a kind of ‘failure in progress,’ helped along by conveniently diverting dollars for truly affordable housing — including funds for repair and refurbishing — to other national needs.

However, evidence everywhere mounts concerning the inadequacy of public/private partnerships. These can spin off much-needed truly affordable housing, but only by small handfuls of units in mixed income projects, built to primarily satisfy the for-profit needs of free market housing developers.

A measure of this social housing build inadequacy, together with a growing lack of truly affordable housing — much of it decaying social housing — is to be found in ballooning homelessness numbers.

Faced with this reality, some governments have waltzed their way onto a grandstand to hype “An Affordable Housing Vision For The Future” or some such racy prose to suggest that truly affordable housing is back on their radar.

But is it really? When Canada announced its program in 20171 in an orgy of government self-congratulation, there was much rejoicing. At least there was rejoicing until people began to take a pencil to the prose and tot up the underlying reality. Their conclusions weren’t so pretty.2

Now it’s New Zealand’s turn to lard the local press with “Look at me, Mummy!” superlatives such as: “. . . put into place a public housing building program on a scale that has not been seen in New Zealand for 40 years.”

Well, Mummy has looked and, in the light of skyrocketing homelessness (among other housing problems), is not overly impressed.

Read more about why the New Zealand government, while clearly coasting for a boasting, may simply be dog-paddling in yesterdays’s social housing shallows rather than actively tackling the scope of the national housing crisis. In Scoop: Government’s Homelessness Action Plan Misses The Mark In The Face Of Rising House Prices

Footnotes

  1. Canada’s National Housing Strategy
  2. The Really Grand, Super Exciting Canadian Housing Strategy Currently Leaking Hot Air

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