UN rapporteur is wrong on housing rights

The United Nations is correct to consider New Zealand’s housing crisis as a substantial human rights issue. But while the UN is often excellent at seeing problems, it is not so good at suggesting appropriate solutions.

Henry Cooke last week reported that the Government had invited UN special housing rapporteur Leilani Farha to New Zealand. The problems in housing are obvious and have been for some time.

Too few homes relative to the number of people who want to live in homes pushes up the cost of housing – both rents and the price of houses.

This leads to overcrowding and people living in garages, sheds and vehicles.

Housing costs contribute materially to New Zealand’s poverty statistics.

The effects of overcrowding are seen in health statistics and the inability to find housing in employment-rich places means people are often stuck in locations with few opportunities.

All of those have human rights consequences. But they also stem from absolutely none of the problems Farha pointed to.

They stem from ignoring one other rather important right.

Farha suggested New Zealand needs a capital gains tax to keep housing costs in line. But a capital gains tax has never built a house.

New Zealand has a shortage of houses. If you look across the United States, in which capital gains taxes vary state by state, housing affordability is not driven by differences in capital gains regimes. California’s capital gains tax on housing is more restrictive than Georgia’s but fast-growing Atlanta is far more affordable than San Francisco. Tax is not the issue. Farha also suggested rent freezes as a way of keeping costs down for tenants.

But rent controls discourage investors from building new housing. And they also make it harder to deal with the existing shortage.

At the core, Farha saw the problem as property price speculation.

But the real problem is a massive shortage of housing.

And that is an issue of the set of rules councils put in place that make it difficult to build new housing, and a set of institutions created by central government making it difficult for councils to accommodate growth.

What we need is a right to build, and institutions to support it. Farha urges us to take the housing crisis seriously as a human rights issue.

We do not need UN ‘‘experts’’ in housing that seem utterly clueless.

We have better experts right here.

Then Housing Minister Phil Twyford was absolutely correct when last year he suggested the best way of dealing with capital gains is to allow so much building that those gains never happen in the first place.

It is time to build. And it is the right thing to do.