Wednesday, 27 July 2016

Making New Zealand

The politically unaligned Making New Zealand blog was launched yesterday by an independent group of professionals who want to raise the level of public debate and understanding about housing, infrastructure, cities and planning.

Contributors to Making New Zealand span the political spectrum but their aim is for New Zealand to have affordable housing with a clear understanding of what New Zealanders prefer in their housing choices.

Related to this - economics, infrastructure and design - we see as important components and invite everyone to engage in this issue.

“A lot of urban policy is based on plausible assumptions that actually are not supported by real-life experience anywhere. For example, changing zoning to allow more intense development is always forecasted to unleash far more supply of housing units than what actually ends up being built. This is mostly because these zoning changes cause land values to increase even faster than otherwise, and as Arthur Grimes pointed out in a 2010 paper, all the profit potential is captured in land values rather than in newly constructed buildings," pointed out Phil Hayward, an independent researcher, writer and lobbyist on urban policy issues.

"We should learn from the decades of over-estimated housing supply by urban planners in the UK, and avoid a replay of their costly and now-irreversible blundering”.

"Transport policy in our largest and most troubled market aims to focus investment in already intensively developed urban areas, raising environmental and financial risks," added Phil McDermott, an independent consultant in development planning.

"It’s a double-whammy for unaffordability. Existing urban areas with limited capacity for growth receive expensive improvements. While that will increase the desirability of living there for some of those that can afford the higher costs and inflated property values, it leaves many more stranded without access either to traditional suburban housing or to multi-unit dwellings of any quality.

“One key, in the case of Auckland, is to free up for development sufficient greenfields land so that the land value/rent curve is at least stabilized from the fringe back into the inner city, allowing more affordable and better quality housing to be developed city wide," McDermott suggested.

"Housing is the mega issue facing New Zealand today," said the Making New Zealand blog editor Matthew Webster.

"We're simply not building enough houses and the ones we are building are almost exclusively targeting the high end of the market. Investors know that as long as land supply is constrained developers won't be able to meet demand, so they keep on investing. "

"We'll be challenging the status quo, because things have to change. We want all New Zealanders and those who have chosen to make it their home to be a part of the conversation, because this is our country and it's up to us to make it right again," said Andrew Atkin, another contributor to the MNZ site and coordinator of the facebook page.

ENDS

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