We aren’t building enough publicly-owned houses

While other countries continue to build public housing, Aotearoa goes through periods of not building homes at all, selling off stock and making it less available to people.

Public housing makes up only 4% of all housing stock in Aotearoa. And while the sixth Labour government started up the build programme again, we haven’t reached the numbers needed to restore the 1991 state housing share of dwellings (we have around 40,000 less!).

The stalling of state housing construction has a ripple effect on all of our lives – it forces more people into private rentals, and ultimately more people into overcrowded housing, onto couches, and into cars.

We’ve been selling and privatising state housing and land

Privatisation of public housing has come in different forms over the years – direct sell offs, stock transfers to charity providers, right to buy schemes that don’t replace the stock, selling public housing land to private developers, and more private investor involvement. 

Successive governments have chosen to demolish state houses and sell the land underneath them to private developers to cover the costs of renewals, rather than put more direct funding into the build programme. 

Communities like Māngere, Mt Roskill, Glen Innes, Porirua have had large-scale urban regeneration projects which build new state housing and upgrade infrastructure, but at the expense of significant amounts of Crown land being sold off for expensive market rate housing.

This process of state-led gentrification drives up private rents in these areas as landlords profit from public investment and infrastructure upgrades, and large amounts of land which could be used for more state housing or to be returned to hapū, is now privatised. 

While some of our state homes are at the end of their life, we should not be selling land to pay for retrofits and renewals. The current coalition government plans to sell around 800 state houses a year, demolish 700 and build 1500 houses (likely through community providers rather than the state).

We’re propping up property investors 

The back door is being opened up for private investors to play a larger role and profit from ‘social housing’. The government announced new procurement policies for the delivery of new “social housing” places. These include making the Income Related Rent Subsidy “more attractive for financiers” and making it easier for private investors to lease housing to Community Housing Providers who will manage the tenancies. 

Many CHPs do not have access to the resources needed to build the housing we need at scale. The policy settings currently being worked on will increasingly force them to partner with private investors, leasing properties from them. 

Private investors do not have any social obligations to or interest in providing long-term socially rented homes, they are interested in making profit. This means that they can pull the rug out from under community providers at any time, leading to the loss of these socially rented places.

In the absence of adequate levels of state housing, we are putting massive amounts of public money into the pockets of landlords through the Accommodation Supplement. Recent legislative changes which support overseas corporate landlords to invest in build-to-rent housing risks more and more land moving from public ownership into the hands of investors who seek profit maximisation over the wellbeing of renters. Lessons from overseas have shown that multinational companies investing in build-to-rent can lead to rent hikes, worsening conditions for renters and not building the homes we need. 

The government plans to stagnate the building of new net public housing. This is making our housing crisis worse, forcing more people into garages, couches, cars and parks. But it doesn’t have to be like this, we’ve built public housing at scale before – housing people in decent and suitable housing and building thriving communities. We can do it again.