DCC can’t fix housing problems on its own
What is the taskforce and what does it hope to achieve?
The task force for housing has brought together representatives from council, community housing providers, social service agencies, government departments, public health specialists, commercial property managers and runaka.
Our job is to identify the key challenges Dunedin is facing in terms of housing, both for renters and home owners, and make recommendations on how to address them.
The issues are complex, and certainly can’t be ‘‘fixed’’ by the council alone. We were very clear from the outset that the scope of the task force’s brief was wider than the city council and will look to make recommendations wherever they might help improve our local situation.
They were instrumental in developing the council’s submissions on minimum standards for rental properties and the review of tenancy law, for example.
We’ve been lucky to have had the support of Community Housing Aotearoa who have facilitated the meetings, and who have a strong background in helping cities around the country come up with local solutions.
What are the major issues with Dunedin’s housing market?
The group identified a range of broad themes to address: social housing, homelessness, security of tenure, affordability and healthy homes among them.
The housing market is only one piece of this puzzle.
We’re certainly seeing affordability become an issue, both for firsthome buyers and renters, in a way that hasn’t historically been the case.
This is in part due to the city’s population growing far faster in recent years than it has in generations.
The largest cohort among them are people aged 2539, which has traditionally been something of a gap in Dunedin, which I think is testament to the city’s growing selfconfidence and lifestyle appeal.
Construction crews for university and hospital projects have arrived and will be here for the best part of a decade, and our city is becoming increasingly diverse as a former refugee resettlement centre.
In terms of supply, the decisions and any subsequent appeals on the District Plan will inevitably have some impact.
Regardless of those outcomes, the Government has now designated Dunedin as a ‘‘medium growth city’’, which means we need to continually monitor the demand for, and supply of, land for residential purposes, rather than waiting for private plan change requests or the next full plan review.
I also acknowledge that the cost of accommodation is only one half of the affordability equation; the other is the incomes people have available to pay for it.
We spend a lot of energy tying ourselves in knots to find the best public policy outcomes that accept that there are people who don’t have enough money to live on.
That has to change, too, but wider economic settings are slightly outside of our remit.
How urgently do those issues need to be fixed?
I think there is a spectrum of urgency across the various issues.
From the outset, the taskforce made our most vulnerable citizens our top priority, which is largely centred around growing numbers of people sleeping rough, the supply of emergency and social housing, and legislative reform to better protect the health and security of people living in rental accommodation.
It’s difficult to get exact data, but our best estimate at the moment is that Dunedin is about 600 units short in terms of social housing.
The landscape has shifted a bit since we looked to establish this group, Housing New Zealand are back in the business of building houses, but the total of those is modest compared to the shortfall.
Beyond that, making sure housing doesn’t make people sick is a pretty big priority. It’s a massive drain on our public health system, essentially a public subsidy for rogue landlords happy to make money out of misery.
The new regulations will hopefully fix this, which is good news for tenants and for the good landlords out there who are already doing the right thing.
I don’t think we can afford to lose sight of the affordability issues, though. It’s long been a core part of Dunedin’s appeal, that we don’t have the stresses around traffic and commuting times and skyrocketing costs of living.
If left unchecked, the combination of factors I’ve mentioned could really start to jeopardise this, which should concern all of us.