National have committed to keeping most of the density rules they agreed to with Labour, with the tweak of giving councils a little more flexibility around where people can build up to three storeys. Overall a great move, and one that will hopefully have a downwards pressure on house prices.
They have also indicated they plan to build more state houses, as well.
As someone who is glass half full I’m looking forward to the influx of high-density Air BnBs in outer suburbs for me to stay in if I have a health appointment in the city.
I’d rather more people got to live in them though.
Where does this “the landlords will buy them all” attitude come from? If that happens, just build more. And repeat as necessary until there is enough housing stock to go around.
Not only is it a defeatist attitude, but it just doesn’t line up with how the world works.
As long as there is land to build on, and there is, we can just keep building them until demand is met.
This is one of my concerns: we shouldn’t be building on new land, we should be building up. But if left up to councils, do we really think this will happen? I took the central government stepping in to get many local councils to even consider medium density in the first place.
I’m also including under utilised land that can be cleared and redeveloped in the “available land” category.
Fair enough. There is definitely a lot of underutilized land which can be repurposed.
Where I live, there is limited land zoned for industrial, so it concentrates businesses to one or two areas. This isn’t a problem, but because of zoning it means this land can never be repurposed into housing. Not that we need it yet, when the CBD has plenty of buildings which could be turned into residential/retail dual use buildings, instead of half empty offices for things that could be done at home…
It really does though. We’ve seen it for years. New Zealand is wildly underinvested in productive assets and we have an eyewatering level of private household debt. This is because residential real estate is heavily used as a store of value and source of capital gain.
Expecting New Zealanders to stop hoarding housing stock is like expecting Indian housewives to stop buying up gold jewellery.
I’m writing this from a town where over a third of houses stand empty on census night while local families live in all kinds of shitty “gottages”. The demand and supply are both here.