Dom Post on affordable housing

The Dom Post editorial:

 Making promises is a politician’s stock-in-trade. Unfortunately, delivering on those pledges is often not as easy as voters have been led to believe.

There are few policy areas in which that is more true than housing affordability, where there has long been a disconnect between grand promises and brutal reality.

It was therefore unwise for Labour leader David Shearer to allow those struggling to save for their first home to get overly optimistic about his promise to build 100,000 new dwellings in 10 years at an average sale price of $300,000. That would simply not be possible in many parts of Auckland, at least not for the sort of houses, complete with sizeable gardens and lawns, most of the present generation of first-home buyers grew up in.

Mr Shearer has now made clear that many of the 40,000 to 50,000 homes Labour plans to build in the city will be apartments or terraced housing. The same will probably also be true in Wellington, where $300,000 would be an unrealistic price for anything other than a small apartment or a terraced townhouse on a meagre section.

Their policy should be called Affordable Flats not Affordable Houses, or at one person suggested – Affordable Rooms 🙂