Oh, you mean 'affordable housing' for double income middle class property speculating families

Moving onto affordable housing already? What happened to catching up with Australia by 2020 and 4000 jobs from the cycle track?

Sadly for National, those windmills have packed up and left for Sydney, so they need a new windmill to look like they are chasing to shake off that rudderless look they have picked up from the utter lack of direction the country now finds itself in.

National's plan to make housing affordable will work as well as their plan to reverse Kiwi's leaving for Oz, setting the southern boundary for Auckland at Hamilton isn't a solution Mr English, it's a sprawl that never ends. This is policy for developers, not people.

The red tape National want to cut to speed up building consents is now used to plug all those leaky homes built after the last red tape purge, so this constant scream to mug the RMA of it's regulatory role is as predictable as National dumping environmental reports so their farmer mates can't be held responsible for their pollution.

Gareth Morgan points out that it isn't the supply of housing that is the problem...

The problem with the Productivity Commission’s analyses is that its authors are locked in a time warp, thinking that the quarter acre pavlova paradise is the appropriate model for housing still. Of course if your thinking is confined by that paradigm then it is very easy to argue there isn’t enough land. But any user pays analyses would rapidly indicate that this type of urban expansion would make housing even less affordable. Only if other ratepayers are willing to stump up with the cost of infrastructure would such a dated type of housing be affordable. No cities in the first world have kept unfettered urban sprawl their model for the future.

We all know what the problem with housing in New Zealand is. It’s the flipside of the problem the new Governor of the Reserve Bank has identified with the economy at large. He noted that the economy will not pick up until the country gets its huge external debt levels down. But look at what that money has been raised for – it has been raised overseas by our banks overseas and on-lent into the property market in New Zealand. The flipside of the high debt is simply a housing base that is valued at these record levels.

And how have we managed to drive the price of the housing stock to these dizzying levels? There are two drivers – the directive from the Reserve Bank to the banks to treat mortgage lending as the safest form of lending and therefore to expand that far more than loans to businesses that create jobs and incomes; and the tax break that tells us all that if investing in property is a tax-free path to prosperity. That toxic duo has led to us all falling into property big time, buying a few houses each as a way to get rich. Resultingly, we have driven the price of housing from twice the average household income to six times. And surprise, surprise – property is now out of the reach of a greater proportion of would-be homeowners.

...we need better inner city apartments and we need far more of them, that's the reality. I've lived in the central city of Auckland for almost 2 decades. I love it, but the quality of apartments is very poor and the quality of life isn't being made better by the Council.

I find it amusing listening to Len Brown tell me he wants more urban development when the council are forcing inner city residents to pay for parking overnight and can't seem to do a thing about the booze outlets who never close.

Many apartments are built for overseas students and have none of the quality locals are looking for. We need more 3-4 bedroom apartments that are built with families in mind combined with a massive increase in the state housing stock to alleviate the housing crisis.

We need to look back to the 1930's massive state home building program and implement some big Government Keynesianism to rebuild the state housing stock for the poor while allowing developers the opportunity to develop environmentally and socially friendly apartment living.

We need actual vision and ideas here to enable the next generation who have been locked out of the housing market by property speculating baby boomers.

This attempt by National is meaningless fodder to choke the news cycle to look like they have a direction. It is a pretense and we shouldn't accept it as a real vision for Auckland.

John Key wants to consult with Auckland the way he consulted with Maori, school closures in Christchurch and Ecan.

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