24 September 2020, rnz.co.nz/news

The Māori Party is promising to halt all immigration into New Zealand until housing supply catches up with demand, if it becomes part of the next government.

It is part of the party’s housing programme, Whānau Build, unveiled today by co-leader John Tamihere.

The party is also vowing to allocate half of all new social housing units to Māori, and build 2000 homes on ancestral land over the next two years.

It is estimated to cost of $600 million – tagged from the government announced $20 billion Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund.

“These houses will be funded by the state as a long-overdue investment that others have taken for granted,” Tamihere said.

“It will help in resetting and reorganising Māori whānau and Māori whenua by making available land for papakaīnga and ensuring that our land is used in the best possible way.”

Tamihere said there would be special exceptions for some migrants.

“If we’ve got skill gaps, only, we would bring in people. And family integration, we accept that, because we’re as human as all other people. But other than that, we will put the shutter down and say, we need to take a breather here.”

“We’ve had 50,000 new immigrants coming in per year in 2017 and 2018, and heading into 2019 … we need to build our supply side up for housing to meet our demand.”

Tamihere said vacant or empty houses would be taxed to force them into the housing market.

“In Auckland, there’s 38,000 of them and unless they are brought into the housing stock and used for rental – because they are by and large [of] good quality – we have a problem.

“The question is, why would people leave these houses vacant after they’ve bought them? It’s because they double in price every eight years, so you’re going into a casino where you can’t lose. So you have to, for the sake of all New Zealanders, tax foreign ownership of residential property, particularly if its left vacant. If we don’t do that we will never get out of the housing crisis.”

The Overseas Investment Act would also be required to apply to all residential housing purchases because many of these vacant houses were owned by foreign interests, he said.

“It is expected this policy will free up over 50,000 houses and ensure that an asset class people invest in, but can never lose, has some consequences for the greater common good of our country.

“Immigration must be stopped until the supply side of housing meets the demand side. Immigration is causing disruption and adding to the false elevation in demand and therefore elevation in prices.”

The Māori Party is also hoping to impose a capital gains tax of 2 percent of the appreciation per annum on any property not considered a whānau home.

It is also pledging to stop the sale of freehold land to off-shore interests.

A Government plan to charge people for emergency housing like motels was derailed by Covid-19, but will now come into effect two days after the election

Dileepa Fonseka, Newsroom, 22 September 2020

For most of us the biggest event of the last two years was Covid-19, but for one South Auckland family it was a home renovation.

A family of seven (two adults and five children) have lived beside rodents, been shunted to different corners of Auckland, and had their belongings flooded out in a garage they used for storage – after their landlord of five years decided to renovate the property they lived in.

Mary* spends her days looking for houses, making applications for rentals, getting rejected then taking those seven-eight applications in to Work and Income at the end of the week – where she waits in line for three hours – so she can prove she hasn’t been able to find a house.

“Most of the time I’m stressing out here trying to deal with housing every week. Reporting and following everything they tell me to do to keep us here for my boys to have a roof.

“I don’t know how to do this … I don’t sleep at night. Even if I’m tired. I can sleep for three hours and I wake up and I feel like tired, but I just won’t sleep.”

Read the full article here

Mandy Te, stuff.co.nz, 17 September 2020

The Green Party and The Opportunities Party have announced they will both support the introduction of rent caps which would limit the amount a landlord could increase rent.

At the Enough for All: Election Forum 2020 event in Wellington Central on Wednesday evening, a renter called Zoe told politicians about her renting experience in the capital city.

“In 2017, I moved into an eight-bedroom flat in central Wellington – nine of us lived there in order to make it affordable, and we shared a rent of $1600 per week,” she said.

“My rent for a room that could charitably be called a shoebox room was $205 a week which was more than half my income at the time.”

Affording the rent was stressful for Zoe and her flatmates – many had taken on one or more jobs while studying to cover it.

“It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence that me and my flatmates needed to often cover for our other flatmates because of the inability to pay rents on time.”

While they managed to make their payments every week, Zoe said their home was not warm or dry.

“In our first winter in the flat, I began to notice black mould on my ceiling.”

A month later, the roof in her room began to leak and later, pour, she said.

The flat was offered $200 in compensation.

Zoe said their rent was hiked up year after year – in 2018, it was $1700 per week and in 2019, it was put up to $1800.

To make rent affordable, 11 people were living in the property.

In February, the flat was told their rent was going up again by $200 – making it $2000 a week.

“Obviously we moved out because it was unaffordable and over that same period, my income and the same with my flatmates’ [income] had barely gone up.”

Renters needed action now, she told politicians.

“My question to you is: until the rental housing supply kicks up with demand, does your party support introducing rent caps to limit the amount by which landlords can raise rent?”

Ricardo Menéndez-March from the Green Party said it supported “to legislate to ensure secure and affordable long-term rental accommodation”.

“I do think we need to we need to make sure landlords are not ripping us off in the middle of a housing crisis.”

It was “absolutely unfair” for people to be spending most of their income on rent and “people here are going without because of high rents”.

National Party’s Nicola Willis acknowledged that there was a massive housing challenge in Wellington but the party would not support the introduction of rent caps.

“We have to increase the supply of housing that’s why we’re committing to replacing and appealing the Resource Management Act … we believe that kind of systemic reform gets to the nub of our housing issue which comes down to not enough houses to keep up with demand. When we solve that, then rents and house ownership become more affordable.”

Taylor Arneil from New Zealand First said it advocated for the building of more homes instead of introducing rent caps.

Labour Party’s Andrew Little said it did not support introducing rent caps.

“This Government has done a number of things. We have regulated what landlords can and cannot do or need to do in terms of quality of housing and many things are starting to kick in,” he said.

The Labour Party had inherited a housing crisis from the previous Government which had reduced the country’s state housing stock, he said.

The current Government had added to social housing, he said.

“There is more to do and Kiwibuild hasn’t been the success we would have hoped it might be, but we have built houses that are more affordable for more people, and we need to continue through things likes progressive home ownership schemes,” Little said.

The Opportunities Party leader Geoff Simmons said housing was the biggest issue facing New Zealand.

“To solve this problem we need to hold house prices and rents stable for another generation to allow our incomes to catch up,” Simmons said.

“So this is a massive, massive challenge – it is going to take lots of different actions to do that.”

Anna Mooney, spokeswoman for Renters United, a group that advocates for renters and has begun a petition for fair rent, said it was unfortunate “National, Labour and NZ First are offering no solutions to runaway rents other than increasing supply”.

“That will take decades, while renters fall deeper into hardship,” Mooney said.

“Renters United wants to see rent caps in which landlords cannot raise rent by more than inflation. This is the only way to stop rents from becoming more unaffordable.”