Housing woes on many fronts

Southland’s new housing taskforce faces a monstrous challenge but it’s not one that can be regarded with a remote sense of dispassionate pessimism. There is scarcely an issue more pressing on our collective wellbeing. The province has a real shortage of affordable housing. But the problem of unavailability has an evil twin.

Quality. Or the lack of it. Much of the lower cost rental housing stock we do have is in a sorely degraded state and the Government’s legitimate agenda of requiring upgrading work is creating a crunch that will take some of the roughest properties out of the slum biz where they have for so long been earning income for landlords on the spurious basis that awful as they are, they’re the best some people can afford.

The fact that a correction is now unassailably necessary in the cause of public health doesn’t stop it being, potentially, a serious disruption that we do seem ill-placed to handle.

Rental costs are being rammed up, which increases pressure in another problem area – real gaps in the availability of social and emergency housing.

Then we have our ageing population, carrying with it a rising demand for aged care housing.

As for younger people wanting to get into their own homes, not a lot of houses have been hitting the market for families and first-time buyers.

Some of the province’s more popular areas are particularly pressured hot spots like Te Anau and Riverton.

And – not everyone will rush to console these guys but it does make the list of issues when it comes to recruiting the highly qualified into the province – it turns out Southland also has a lack of executive housing.

Next, the small matter of the aching need identified in the Southland Regional Development Strategy to attract more people into the province – 10,000 by 2025. Presumably these newcomers are going to want to live somewhere.

We’re even approaching a Catch 22 problem in the extent to which people are wondering aloud where the influx of building tradies needed to undertake Invercargill’s major inner-city redevelopment projects – and who knows, maybe build a few houses as well – might themselves live.

We needn’t depress ourselves into a complete funk. By any measure southern houses, in good state as well as bad, are cheaply available by nationwide standards. In contrast to many northern communities, the south has room for manoeuvre.

This presents challenges for local and national government – how to empower sorely needed projects while still requiring standards that protect those living in today’s new developments buying into a short, sharp trajectory to tomorrow’s slums. Central to any solution, then, will be a collective awareness of what constitutes good design and construction given the constraints of public and private budgets.

So now we have a taskforce. The newly formed entity, chaired by SBS chief executive Shaun Drylie is one that many will say should have existed long before now. Evidence, perhaps, of the extent to which the Southern Regional Development Strategy hasn’t been achieving the rapid cohesion community effort that was initially expected. Well, OK, it’s here now and any practical assistance it can get must be provided.

‘‘The province has a real shortage of affordable housing. But the problem of unavailability has an evil twin. Quality. Or the lack of it.’’