Auckland’s new homes

Mt Roskill, Papakura, New Lynn and Glen Innes will be the main sites for a major Government-run building scheme revealed this week. These suburbs are set to get hundreds of new houses, many sold at affordable rates, by 2020.

And in an apparent first, nonresident buyers will be blocked from buying properties in some of the affordably priced developments.

Meanwhile, South Auckland suburbs will see a lift in state houses, with plans to build more than 200 more Housing New Zealand properties in Mangere and Manurewa.

Figures provided to the Herald show the Government plans to complete construction of 9000 houses in the first three years of its 10-year plan.

Of that total, 4600 will be sold on the open market. It was initially thought that 20 per cent of them would be sold at affordable levels, defined as less than $650,000.

But Social Housing Minister Amy Adams told the Herald yesterday that 20 per cent was a minimum requirement, and developments would be up to 50 per cent affordable housing.

Asked why they were not made 100 per cent affordable, Adams said there needed to be a range of prices to get buy-in from the developers building and selling the homes.

She said there would be no further developments on the scale of Tamaki and Hobsonville, where construction of 4000 homes is already underway. The newer developments would mostly be 40 to 100 houses in size.

Opposition parties have raised concerns about property speculators snapping up the new homes. But Adams said there would be strict limits on who could buy the afford- ably priced houses and how long they must be owned before being resold. “Our interest is ensuring that people are buying them to live in them, and to live in them for some time.”

Buyers were likely to be limited to first-home buyers and some of the schemes, including the Axis project at Hobsonville, would be restricted to New Zealand citizens and residents.

The programme is the Government’s biggest push yet to address dire housing shortages in the city.

The plan is not as ambitious as Labour’s, which is to build 50,000 Auckland homes over 10 years, all in the affordable range. That is part of a plan to build 100,000 homes nationwide, which was first announced by former leader David Shearer in 2014.

Labour leader Andrew Little said yesterday that National’s plan would not keep up with Auckland’s population growth of 100 more people a day. It failed to prioritise families and first-home buyers, he said.

Adams said she doubted Labour’s plan was feasible. The Government’s policy was based on two years of research. It was not possible to build more houses without creating ghettos or poorly designed, overcrowded developments, she said.

“Could you squeeze more properties on to the land . . . ? Probably. Would it be a good idea? No.

“This is the total amount that can feasibly be built on crown land over the next 10 years if we still care about the quality of the communities we are creating.”

There is an estimated shortfall of 40,000 houses in Auckland to meet current demand. Adams said it was not solely up to Government to address this supply gap.

If there was any doubt that housing is registering high in the National Party’s polls of voters’ concerns this year, it was confirmed by the Government’s house-building announcement this week. The intention to demolish 8300 old state units in the next decade and replace them with 34,200 new units is not as novel as it sounds. The Government has been redeveloping its housing estates for some time to put more units on valuable suburban sites.

But it is new for National to emphasise the building programme rather than the efficient use of the land. Building state houses is Labour’s solution to the housing shortage in Auckland, National’s has been to try to hasten consent for private housing developments.

Labour’s election promise, 50,000 new homes in the next decade, still trumps the net 25,900 new homes National’s plan would provide in the same period, but National’s announcement will have been designed to take the heat out of the accusation that it is running down the state’s housing stock and left itself unable to provide sufficient emergency housing for those in overcrowded and desperate situations.

In fact, only 13,500 of the 34,200 new houses in the 10-year programme announced this week will remain state-owned.

The other 20,700 will be sold and about one in five of them would be priced at a level the Government calls “affordable” (about $650,000 at present). Labour intends to sell all its 50,000 houses for less than $600,000, or $500,000 for apartments.

So that is the choice facing the election: A large state construction programme of houses to be sold into the market with the hope of stabilising or reducing prices or a more limited construction programme that would largely replace old, unsightly state units on large sections with modern, more intensive housing, some of which would be kept for the homeless and destitute but most of the units around them would be sold to private owners to avoid creating visible areas of social housing.

As winter approaches, the Government will be anxious to avoid the reports of families sleeping in cars and other substandard, overcrowded conditions that caught it by surprise last year.

Once again the Government is resorting to renting motels for families with no home to go to, a temporary fix that is plainly unsatisfactory from the taxpayers’ point of view. It is symptomatic of the Government’s response to all facets of the housing boom that it was not prepared for the effects on those who could afford neither to buy nor rent in today’s market.

National looks to be in so much political trouble on housing that it is probably relieved to see Labour produce a policy on the subject that will attract more controversy than anything National has (not) done.

Labour’s proposal to stop owners of rental housing writing off losses against their other income could dominate the discussion until election day.

Many voters have their retirement savings in a rental property these days and it is daring of Labour to suppose they do not need or use the write-off. National does not deserve this stroke of luck; on housing it has been running to catch up.