● Kerre McIvor
What an extraordinary proposal from Auckland’s mayor this week. The talkback lines lit up on Friday after Phil Goff suggested that the answer to the housing crisis was to confiscate vacant homes and have them made available to the homeless.
According to the latest census, the number of vacant properties has risen from 6.6 per cent to 7.3 per cent of the city’s private dwellings and while some of those are holiday homes or homes that are temporarily vacant, a proportion of them are ghost houses — properties deliberately left vacant by investors who want capital gains without the hassle of tenants. These are the ones in the mayor’s sights.
Goff says that the way it would work would be that electricity companies and Watercare would advise when a property had been without power or water for a defined time period, after which a letter would be sent to the property owner.
Hey, it would say, we noticed your house isn’t being used — would you consider having it managed by Housing NZ? To which the only reasonable response would be, Ah, no!
The reason many people leave their homes untenanted is because they have been badly burned by previous occupiers — and left paying for damage that neither the Tenancy Tribunal nor Housing NZ can help them recover.
However, the council says vacant houses could be used for the Housing First programme which finds shelter for homeless people. And they could also be an option for middle income workers struggling to find affordable accommodation.
Scott Figenshow, from Community Housing Aotearoa, thinks it’s a splendid idea. He commends Auckland Council and thinks this shows people are holding on to property as in instrument for creating wealth.
However, Monte Cecelia Housing Trust CEO Bernie Smith smells a rat. He says it’s an election year and people are looking for quick fixes. There are no quick fixes in housing, he says, and one of the reasons people are struggling to find homes is that the houses promised to low income families through KiwiBuild have failed to materialise.
I have every sympathy for people struggling to find homes to rent — let alone own. I know we have a shortage for people on middle incomes — people who are absolutely vital to the running of a city but surely it’s not up to individuals to provide homes for them to live in.
Karl Marx writing in his Communist Manifesto had a point. You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. (Damn tooting we are!) But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. (This might have been true in 1848, when he wrote the Manifesto — today it’s more like threetenths, but point taken . . . )
I think the difference is most people in this country are aspirational and believe that through talent and skills and hard work, they can achieve what 62 per cent of New Zealanders have done and own their own property. Sure there are ways that we can help first-home buyers — rent to own; increasing the housing stock; building homes specifically for first-home buyers on middle incomes — oh, wait. We tried that.
But the point is most Kiwis — most humans — want to earn what they own. Which is why Karl Marx and Phil Goff’s ideas are forever doomed to fail.