There’s a lot of opinions flying around right now, and the debates are only ramping up in Wellington. Get smart: read on!

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Why read about housing and where we put stuff?

Right now, as the NPS-UD says “thou shalt accommodate more people in thy centres”, Wellington (and all towns) need to be learning and talking more, not less.

We must absorb good information and adjust our positions, rather than letting our ignorance and fear of the unknown stop us making better cities for all.

To help a little, we’re curating the best stuff we come across and also firing up Talk Wellington’s cutting-edge, high tech Bullsh*t-O-Meter 3000 – so you can spot what’s worth reading, what’s worth sharing, and what’s best going straight to compost.

We want to populate all these headings with good stuff for your reading pleasure. Occasionally we’ll also call out something egregious (but less often cos bullsh*t mustn’t be spread).

Please also send us tipoffs – good pieces or sites you think others should read. Flick us a link and your hot take on why it’s worth a read, to the Talk Wellington email

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CREATE MORE HOMES, FASTER

Convert other buildings to be homes

Te Kainga is an example of office buildings converted to affordable apartments (press release here and Stuff coverage here and here)

But don’t just let it be a free-for-all – decent standards are still needed otherwise conversions will be just as crappy as many current private rentals (the British Architects association was very opposed to removing all the hoops).

Note: it’s all about money. Someone’s gotta pay the often-significant capital costs of converting a non-residential property to decent residential, or upscaling the intensity of landuse on a site. At the moment in Wellington it’s all still reliant on developers, or the current landowners –  someone needs deep enough pockets to pay and the will to spend their money thus. No-one can compel them to do it if they don’t want to. (This is the fundamental flaw in the “just make better use of existing under-utilised housing” argument that Dave Armstrong quotes trustingly here.)

See below – Mature how NZ invests in property

Build new

Prefab and modular

Most of the early hope for reducing build costs is in this space.

• Prefabrication – PrefabNZ are exciting
• One scheme for modular prefab medium density looked into here by Nine to Noon (with both interviewer and second interviewee throwing some weird unsubstantiated shade)

In greenfields

Papakāinga housing is a new-old way to develop that connects people properly with land, and with each other (guide from Te Matapihi here)

In brand new land you created

The Netherlands: famous for being a bit short on land above sea level, and Amsterdam had a housing crisis. So they made some islands for people to live on. No, not the preposterous oil-fever-dream islands you’re thinking of, but an archipelago of seven islands joined with mass transit, being built deliberately to really function well as places for ordinary folks to live good lives. Ijburg is an internationally-esteemed example of really good city-building – literally.

In brownfields

Comprehensive development is the best and most efficient way to convert former non-residential or low-density residential urban land to higher-density residential and mixed use. It’s really hard and costly in NZ cos towns are made up of thousands of tiny, separately-freehold-owned plots.

Marmalade Lane, above, is an example of a really good comprehensive development (happens also to be cohousing, though these are a minority because of the social processes involved).

Portland has just passed a promising-sounding reform to encourage intensification by private landowners on low-density (suburban) properties

MAX UP THE DENSITY DONE WELL

We’ve had some nasty-as intensifications – nasty in terms of the living environment they offer people, and a few with objectively bad design, notwithstanding that this has a large aesthetic (taste) element too.

Density done well is what it says on the tin.

• Enables lots of good social cohesion in its built form – discussed here
• Gives everyone warmth, dryness, and some exposure to green and natural stuff.

This can be done through smart planning and enabling. The UK’s Housing Commission recommended several sensible things.

Get sensible about “context” and “character”

• Slippery and fraught terms, along with “historical” and “heritage”. A thought-provoking piece from Citylab.
• A nice Tumblr called Keep Newtown Character
• A cracking example of good design – social processes as well as the physical infrastructure – Nightingale Housing developments

Do better community engagement

Seattle’s methods get a lot of exposure, outlined here in the Guardian with lots of hope for using them locally for a less fraught public conversation.

Is consensus a prerequisite for improving a city’s housing situation (as the Seattle article’s headline suggests)? Citylab say it’s foolish to aim for consensus in intensification discussions, let alone making it a prerequisite.

BUILD BETTER QUALITY STOCK

Warmer, drier, more universally accessible

Accessibility: if building from scratch, there’s no excuse not to consider universal accessibility, and almost no excuse to fail to provide for it. We have a massive shortfall in accessible housing given 25% of NZers experience a physical disability of some kind.

A growing proportion of the UK’s social housing is Passive, as the UK catches up with build quality in Europe

What NZ property managers think of the cold damp homes they look after

How can we tell?

• Practically, things like Whare Hauora are enabling residents to know the relative warmth and dryness of rooms in their home.
• Homestar ratings (for environmental and living performance) have taken a hit recently, highlighting their “we made our own one” status in contrast to the extensively-studied internationally-used Passive House standard (here, and response here on RNZ)
• Accessibility: there’s good international standards out there. If you build so people can age in place, with everything that entails, as if by magic you create places everyone can live a dignified, rich life. Wow!

How much better?

A big question. Better homes are generally more expensive to build (until you get decent economies of scale).

ACTIVELY DO AFFORDABLE & PUBLIC HOUSING

Don’t do it like the US, do it more like Europe

The US approached “public housing” with an unsustainable model, whereas a more common (Western) European approach (“social housing”) is much more mainstream, dignified, and sustainable. A useful comparison here from NPR.

Do proactive things to improve affordability, but pick your tools carefully

Some kind of bake-in is required.

Be careful with tools: inclusionary zoning and rent controls

Rent control is probably the most famous (and obvious) tools for affordability, while inclusionary zoning is one of the nerdier but still better-known.

Here’s one definition: “Typically, inclusionary zoning requires [key word there!] that a set percentage of new homes be sold at an ‘affordable’ price, with that price determined by reference to median household incomes in the relevant city or region.” (Read more about this from David Mead on Community Housing Aotearoa.)

Rent control is what it says on the tin: city or other officials regulating an upper limit on the amount of rent a landlord can charge, intending to limit housing costs.

Is there a new greenfield subdivision coming in your area like Lincolnshire Farms or Plimmerton Farm? No doubt there’ll be lots of criticism (like with Shelly Bay) that it won’t be affordable. And people will reach for inclusionary zoning and rent controls. But do your policy-making carefully; done crudely, inclusionary zoning can result in market-rate units having to subsidise the affordable ones therefore bumping the former’s prices up, resulting in no downward pressure on prices overall. A good paper here from the Property Council . And rent controls, similarly, have bucketloads of perverse effects which can overwhelm the good impact for individual households. This is a good explanation of the economics.

Lest we forget: the real way to get affordable housing – that’s priced to the resident at less than it cost to build – is to properly tax existing wealth and put loads of resourcing into public-good housing generators (like we did right up til the 1970s through the government housing machinery, and our comparator nations have been doing through a far greater range of mechanisms, since ages ago).

Get community housing trusts

Housing trusts and equivalents are one of those missing mechanisms in New Zealand which other places – especially Europe, and South America – have lots of, playing a vital role in their housing ecosystem. Here are some examples – an American-perspective roundup of European “public” housing, and a zoom-in on the setup in famously affordable (and liveable) Vienna.

Here, Queenstown is leading the way in Aotearoa with a well-performing Community Housing Trust, supported by lots of progressive policies (including some inclusionary zoning (see above)).

MATURE HOW NZ INVESTS IN PROPERTY

Fix the privileging of property as an investment for regular folks

The ordinary NZ investment market (i.e. what people do with some savings when they want to make more of them) is overwhelmed by property. Besides the pathological effects on our housing market), it impoverishes the rest of the economy. Kiwis put our savings into houses rather than businesses – anything like they do elsewhere – so our private sector can’t get any of that capital.

as Dave Armstrong put it: “In the time it took me to write this column, I earned about $120 in capital gain on my house. It’s a perfect metaphor for this country. If you want to do really well, don’t produce anything useful, just buy property, sit on your arse, and let market forces do the rest.”

We just didn’t think it was the best use of our hard-earned money to … deprive us of the opportunity to invest in businesses that will hopefully give us good financial returns and create jobs and prosperity for other New Zealanders.

Sadly, now that our money is tied up in one huge asset, it gives us shelter and security, but it no longer has the opportunity to be directly invested in New Zealand businesses to get them started, or to help them grow. 

Shamubeel Eaqub, in Stuff (link. below)

So yes, wealth tax – the Tax Working Group’s recommendations haven’t gone away, no matter how much people dance around them.

Make it easier for large-scale institutional investors to invest in good housing

Elsewhere, big stable financial institutions (retirement funds, trusts etc) are investing in housing through a range of different vehicles including new ones (EU Housing Partnership summary here) . This provides a vital flow of capital, which we badly need given how there’s basically only councils / central government and private developers at this stage.

(But beware – the vehicles need careful design; there’s concern over who’s an investor in Real Estate Investment Trusts)

Some promising things:

• Māori and iwi bodies investing in papakāinga and in general housing
• ACC getting into housing
• a community land trust trial in Kirikiriroa/Hamilton
• new lending models for cohousing (currently flummoxing our banks, see below)
• the Society for Alternative Housing Development – a wealth of useful proposals

Make it less stupidly hard to get a loan for a good small home

Newsroom discovered that all the major banks have a blanket discrimination against lending on small apartments – the most affordable housing currently out there. For a 40 or 45 square metre home (a perfect studio apartment) they demand a whopping 50% deposit – with zero evidence to support their claim that it’s a riskier lend.

Update here – cages are being rattled…

MATURE OUR INSURANCE AND RISK ARENA

• Some useful numbers quoted in this otherwise very personal piece about apartments and earthquakes
• The consternation and fear that existing Wellington apartment owners feel
• Useful discussion here about existing apartment owners being put over a barrel by insurers’ rising premia
• What priority are existing apartment owners for public assistance, when they’re already in the privileged class of Kiwis?
  

MATURE OUR RENTAL CULTURE

• Generation Rent, the short and powerful book by economists Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub, is simply excellent and we reckon the best accessible summary of our housing crisis and how to sort it. Pick up a copy anywhere Bridget Williams Books are sold [update 2021: now out of print, but in the libraries and good second-hand bookshops all over]. It’s got a dozen direct, sensible things we should do immediately to fix our rental culture and market.
• Investment advisor Rob Stock’s review is here. Generation Rent revisited (2019) in Metro magazine
• “I’ve bought a house, at last “– Shamubeel’s piece on the Eaqubs’ recent house purchase, mostly for bad reasons
• An excellent summary of the Residential Tenancies reform last year (allegedly “landlord bashing”) on The Detail. Check out major landlord Mark Todd (Ockham Residential) on landlording in NZ at about 10 min in.

SORT OUT INFRASTRUCTURE SO TRANSPORT AND PIPES WORK BETTER, HARDER

Comprehensive development approaches like this one in Auckland need to be applied to brownfield places too, not just greenfield

NZ’s broken funding system for local infrastructure (ever-increasing unfunded mandates on local government) needs a dramatic fix, pronto. We can’t force councils with the only option of pumping developers for the cost shortfall.

There’s reform to three waters (sewage, drinking, stormwater) in the works, but transport infrastructure needs a rark-up alongside landuse, so we start getting those 15-minute neighbourhoods.

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And there’s more always coming…

Got more things we should add to the Thoughtful Person’s list? Drop us a line…

Tags: growth, Housing, planning