The average house price in New Zealand is over a million dollars. It’s more if you want to live in a city. It’s entirely unsustainable from a social stability perspective. To give one example, NZ’s zero covid approach failed because it got into overcrowded houses, emergency motel housing, and marginalised communities.

This puts NZ’s housing development on the same sort of trajectory as Melbourne. It was passed with support of both major parties. The opposition leader, our blue party, explicitly said this was a measure to stave off more radical change.

This is a lib strategy to let the market sort out housing problems, framing it as an issue of zoning. If only these anti-density zoning laws were changed, we could have cheap and high-quality housing for all, they think.

While SFH zoning helps to protect property values and restrict density, there’s a lot more to the issue than mere zoning. The elephant in the room is the financialization of homeownership, which both depends on and creates a system in which housing prices increase faster than incomes.

I used to think the English language was cursed and all Anglos were death cultists, but NZ continues to impress.

Am I being paranoid if I have a suspicion that this will lead to a monkey’s paw curling and the poor being stuffed into tiny pods instead of real apartments?

:train-shining: