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In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of New Zealand. Well, at least mine do, because I’m there with the Environment Select Committee to look at New Zealand Agriculture. So how about a look at New Zealand Housing for a change?
Few of our problems here. Over seventy per cent home ownership, though at 53% and 45% the rates are lower for the growing Maori and Pacific Islander populations, higher for Asians who usually buy a house as the price of entry. Homelessness isnt a problem with under a thousand of No Fixed Abode, and most of those with psychiatric problems.
New Zealanders are innovative and inventive, almost as a national character, and this is nowhere better shown than in housing, both in architectural style and policy. The architectural flair applied in housing, especially in bush and beach locations, is stunning and I think I`ve fallen in love with more houses here than anywhere else on Earth. But policy, too, has been pragmatic and inventive. The first state housing began here with the Workers’ Dwelling Act of l905, and was then hugely boosted by the Labour Government from 1937 which also developed various self-build schemes after the war. In 1957 Labour introduced capitalisation of the family benefit for several years ahead in order to put the deposit down on housing, and in 1960 the National Party put sale of state housing to tenants into its election manifesto twenty years ahead of Margaret Thatcher. They won, but it didn’t act as the big vote winner for them that it did for her, perhaps because there were no huge rebates, but more because it looked like what it was: a simple act of Kiwi pragmatism quickly accepted by all parties and which produced no great rush to buy, good as most state housing is with its solidly built homes on the standard quarter acre sections.
Council housing as we know it isn`t a feature in Kiwi land: a mere 5% of rental property and that mainly pensioner accommodation. Most social housing is, therefore, state housing, mostly built by Labour governments to face the huge housing shortages after the war and in the period of mass immigration which followed. Solidly constructed and well designed this was originally developed in small estates, but by the Sixties as the population grew, particularly in Auckland which was soon housing nearly a million people in an area bigger than London, the state developed huge estates like Wainouiomata (happy valley) near Wellington and Mangere (New Polynesia) south of Auckland.
None of this was as extensive or important as council housing in Britain because in a land where good housing was, and is, readily and cheaply available there was less need for social housing, but this didn’t stop state housing become a subject of ideological controversy. In the Eighties the radical free market Labour government corporatised management of the 80,000 or so state houses and increased the rents. This increased pressure to buy, a process accelerated by the incoming National Government from 1990 so that the state, which had provided a third of rental property at the start of the decade, was providing only a fifth via its 50,000 properties by the end and tenants were paying a market rent which was beyond the resources of many of them, producing yet another of the festering mass of grievances which helped carry Labour back to power in l999.
Now state housing is enjoying a new lease of life, albeit at a lower level of activity than the mass provision of the past. Rents are now linked to earnings producing a rent reduction for 40,000 low paid families, while the expansion of building currently taking place is not so much in new estates as “pepperpotted” around other new developments. In housing as elsewhere the Labour coalition government is trying to bring things back into balance, but in a young country with lots of space, easy access to mortgages and a competitive building industry, that balance will be as it always has been: heavily weighted towards private ownership with a comparatively small social sector housing. As in so many other respects New Zealand is a happy land compared with Britain. |
