KiwiBuild tracker works

What’s happened so far?

No KiwiBuild homes have been finished yet, despite Twyford saying last year that he wanted to be walking into one by about now.

But letting the timer start on July 1 allowed the Government to get a few ducks in a row ahead of time.

A 33-person KiwiBuild unit has been set up in the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, while a separate development-focused Affordable Housing Authority will take shape over the next two years.

To deal with those industry constraints, it has implemented two years of fees-free study for apprentice and industry trainees. The KiwiBuild ‘‘visa’’ idea has been replaced by something more controversial that will be set up in a matter of months: a KiwiBuild Skills Shortage List that will enable developers to bring in overseas labour with far less effort than usually required, similar to what happened for the Canterbury rebuild. (These people will all need a place to live, however.)

And some 430 houses are already under construction.

How will the houses be built?

There are three major streams of housing in the works, all on different timeframes.

The first stream is the simplest and will make up the vast majority of the homes in the first two years: properties bought ‘‘off-the-plan’’ from regular property developers. The Government says these should still count as homes ‘‘on top’’ of the private market because generally developers aren’t building modest and affordable homes without the prompting of the Government, and the Government’s balance book will make sure developments that might not be viable will be able to go through. So far roughly 100 proposals have been received from private developers, roughly half for homes in Auckland, and Twyford expects 700 to 800 of them to be built this year.

The second stream is the addition of KiwiBuild homes to already under way developments on Housing NZ land. So far this includes the 30 homes in McLennan, in South Auckland, and 300 in Northcote. The problem for the Government is that the developments started under National. In fact, the Northcote development, launched in 2016, was always going to include ‘‘affordable’’ homes – although a price cap wasn’t set.

The third stream is also the slowest – think whole new suburbs of thousands of homes, complete with transport and schools, probably not ready until nearer to the end of the KiwiBuild timeline. This is where the Greenfield Unitec development in Auckland fits in – the Government has bought a lot of land but is still deep within the planning stages.

SKiwiBuild tracker is designed to be used as a quick window into how the Government’s KiwiBuild policy is going. The Labour-led Government has promised to build 100,000 affordable homes over 10 years.

But that doesn’t quite mean 10,000 a year right away, and we’re not measuring them against that – yet.

Housing Minister Phil Twyford has described a ‘‘ramp-up’’ period to get the policy in full swing, with

1000 homes built in the first year, 5000 in the second, and 10,000 in the third – then 12,000 every year after that. Those ‘‘years’’ are financial years, meaning the first one runs from July 1, 2018, through until July 1, 2019.

We’re measuring the Government against those self-set goals.

The Homes Built category looks at the number of homes that have been completed and are either ready to be moved into or already have a family living in them.

Homes under construction counts the number of homes we know are in the process of being built, with some work on the ground started and a set number of homes planned. This means, as of July 2, we included developments like McLennan and Northcote in Auckland – where houses are being built currently – but exclude that city’s Unitec site, as this area is still in the planning stage. We’ll include active sites where the Government is ‘‘buying off the plan’’ once those have been announced too.

Homes target to keep on track is where we measure the Government against its self-set goal. This target changes every day to reflect how many houses the Government should theoretically have built to keep on track for 1000 in a year. To get to that target, the Government needs to build roughly

2.74 homes a day – so every day we add that number of houses then round to the nearest whole number.

Obviously, property development does not work in a straight line, as this calculation does. There is no

What happens if they

lose the election?

This is not the first ‘‘Kiwi-’’ scheme. The last Labour government launched KiwiSaver and Kiwibank before leaving office, but both of those brands remained intact through nine years of National rule. So will KiwiBuild also survive if Labour loses to National in 2020?

Hard to say. Even if it is entirely on track the programme will only just be getting into fullsteam mode at the next election. Collins, who would be the next housing minister if National wins, acknowledges New Zealand needs a lot more houses. She has said that she probably won’t end anything that’s working well – but she also doubts that it will be.

There is, in general, quite a lot of continuity between New Zealand governments. The houses on the way for KiwiBuild are part of developments born under the previous government. And one of the main criticisms Collins has levelled at Twyford is that KiwiBuild

is just a branding sticker that will be placed over houses that would be built anyway. That it is just a ‘‘sticker’’ would make it easy for Collins to simply rip the sticker off but continue to let the government help the private market build as many homes as possible.

But there is power in a brand. It brings definition to a multi-layered and complicated policy.

National was helping to build plenty of homes in Auckland, some of them affordable, but that message didn’t get across to voters because it wasn’t part of a capital P branded policy. There’s also power from the fact that the sticker actually means something right now – a price cap – and it is stuck in voters’ minds.

New Zealand has a long history of state-backed property development. Home buyers are still salivating over mid-century state homes. If the policy does work, the brand ‘‘KiwiBuild’’ could still be on voters’ lips for decades to come.