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Alan Johnson Philippa Howden-ChapmanShamubeel EaqubA Stocktake of New Zealands Housing FEBRUARY 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe authors would like to thank the many analysts in the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, Ministry of Social Development, Statistics NZ, Ministry of Health, Housing NZ, Treasury, Te Puni Kkiri, emergency housing providers and researchers in He Kainga Oranga/Housing and Health Research Programme, University of Otago, Wellington for the datathey have provided.DisclaimerThe views, opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed by the authors AlanJohnson, Philippa Howden-Chapman and Shamubeel Eaqub in this report donot necessarily reflect the views of the NZ Government, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) or any other government agency. MBIE has made every effort to ensure that the information contained in this report isreliable, but does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness and does not accept any liability for any errors.Crown Copyright 2018Unless otherwise indicated, this work is protected by copyright owned by the Crown.This work is licensed for re-use under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. In essence, you are free to copy, distribute and adapt the material, as long as you attribute the work to the Crown and abide by other licence terms. To view a copy of this licence, visit creativecommons/licenses/by/4.0/. Please note that no departmental or governmental emblem, logo or Coat of Arms may be used in any way which infringes any provision of the Flags, Emblems, and Names Protection Act 1981. Attribution to the Crown should be in written format and not by reproduction of any such emblem, logo or Coat of Arms. Copyright in the photographs used in this publication is not owned or licensed to youby the Crown. You cannot copy, distribute or adapt any photograph without the agreement of the copyright owner. ISBN 978-1-98-853554-8 (online)A Stocktake of New Zealands Housing February 2018TABLE OF CONTENTSFOREWORD HOUSING STOCKTAKE 2INTRODUCTION 31. MARKET RENTING 72. HOME OWNERSHIP 133. NEW HOUSING 194. STATE AND OTHER SOCIAL HOUSING 265. HOUSING ASSISTANCE 316. HOMELESSNESS AND EMERGENCY HOUSING 357. SECURITY OF TENURE 388. THE SOCIAL COSTS AND BENEFITS OF HOUSING QUALITY 42REFERENCES 47APPENDICES 531A Stocktake of New Zealands Housing February 2018Foreword Housing StocktakeThere was a time, in the not-so distant past, when housing was affordable and buying a house toraise your family was not the unobtainable dream it is today.With homeownership now at a 60-year low and families forced to live in overcrowded houses, it is clear New Zealands housing system is failing too many people. That an unknown number of children are living in cars and thousands more are admitted to hospital every year with preventable illnesses caused by poor housing, is nothing short of a tragedy. This Government is committed to fixing New Zealands housing crisis.But to understand how to fix the crisis, we must first understand the extent of the problems. This requires a “warts and all” look at the entire housing continuum from homelessness, to the rising demand for state houses, through to the state of the real estate market. For this reason, the Government commissioned independent experts Alan Johnson, Philippa Howden-Chapman and Shamubeel Eaqub to report on the state of housing in New Zealand.This report is an important building block that will help the Government make policy decisions. It assesses the key parts of our housing system; examining market renting, homeownership, new housing, state and social housing, housing assistance, homelessness and emergency housing, security of tenure and the social costs and benefits of housing quality. We must acknowledge the harsh effects the housing crisis has had on Mori. They have borne the brunt of rapidly rising house prices and skyrocketing rents. A crucial part of Government policy must help more Mori into their own homes, and there are great opportunities to partner with Mori organisations to do this. All New Zealanders deserve to have a secure and healthy home. That is the foundation which allows us all to build happy and successful lives.It is time to take bold action to stop the stress and disruption the housing crisis is causing our people, and especially our kids. HON PHIL TWYFORDMinister of Housing and Urban DevelopmentFebruary 20182A Stocktake of New Zealands Housing February 2018This stocktake report was commissioned by the Minister of Housing and Urban Development the Hon Phil Twyford in November 2017. Its main purpose is to provide the New Zealand public with abroad overview of the current state of housing markets and the housing system in New Zealand. This overview takes the form of a series of brief reviews of various housing outcomes and policy areas and backs these with extensive data and additional references. The brevity of this overview alongside the complexity of the topics it grapples with means that this stocktake is high level and intentionally so. Such a perspective has allowed the authors to identify the key issues facing New Zealand in the housing and social policy spaces. However, although the project brief was to produce a report which is quite descriptive and avoids commenting on policy, this direction has proved difficult to follow completely. This is in part because many of the outcomes identified here are a consequence of policy the high levels of childrens hospitalisations as a result of poor quality housing is one such example. The approach taken here is to limit commentary on policy to just the identification of areas where either additional work should be done or where a re-focus might be useful. Based on this approach the following is offered as a summary of this stocktake.Response to homelessness inadequateIn mid-2016 the previous National Government began to appreciate the extent of the growing shortage in affordable good quality rental housing and commenced an emergency housing programme with some urgency. This programme has expanded the number of places available forfamilies without secure housing from 643 in September 2016 to 1,663 in September 2017 with atarget of 2,155 places by the end of 20171and introduced the Emergency Housing Special Needs Grant (EHSNG). Over the same period the numbers of households categorised as Priority A on thesocial housing waiting list and living in insecure housing almost doubled from 1,139 to 2,168. Evidence on the size and trends in homelessness is always difficult to gather on account of the diverse nature of the problem and the difficulty in measuring it because of privacy and often secrecy around it. From the limited primary data gathering able to be done in the preparation of this report there is no evidence available to suggest that the homelessness problem in its many guises is easing, but it may be stabilising. The suggestion by Ministry of Business Innovation andEmployment (MBIE) in its briefing to the Minister of Housing and Urban Development that Aucklands housing shortage has reached almost 45,000 units and grew by about 8,000 in the pastyear suggests that the most recent response may still not be adequate. Introduction3A Stocktake of New Zealands Housing February 2018A problem in the main centresHome ownership rates have fallen to the lowest levels in 60 years. House price inflation over the past five years has been around 30% across New Zealand overall while incomes have risen by about half this rate. There is however significant regional variance around this average national rate with house prices rising by approximately 65% in Auckland and 45% in Waikato. These increases have had two sorts of impacts. For first-home buyers they present obvious barriers to entering the market which have been added to with lower loan-to-value ratios being required as a result of theReserve Banks policies primarily to promote financial sector stability. On the positive side are historically low interest rates, which have made housing costs for all indebted owner-occupiers lower. The second but somewhat indirect impact is on rents. High house prices have subdued yields on rental property investment and are likely to have also limited new supply of rental housing, which in turn has caused rents to rise faster than incomes. This trend is noticeable since 2015. Housing affordability is not a growing problem for established homeowners and for tenants living in regions with little or no population growth.2It is however a problem for first-home buyers and for tenants in the main cities, the towns and communities around these and resort towns. Current settings around housing assistance programmes, like the Accommodation Supplement, are doing little to relieve these affordability problems.Lack of housing supply exacerbated by infrastructure funding constraints Underlying these affordability problems is an inadequate supply of new housing. While current levelsof building consents and house construction are at decade highs, these levels are not exceptional over a longer history and have certainly not been adequate for the strong population growth experienced over the past five years. This population growth has been fuelled by a large increase in net migration that has had a particular impact on Auckland, which is growing at the rateof 40,000 people per year. The current shortfall of housing in Auckland is estimated to be at around 28,000 dwellings over the past decade, although other estimates put this deficit at 45,000 units. Constraints around planning and resource and building consents have been blamed for thisshortfall and there is probably some justification for this. However, bigger existing and future constraints are around the funding and provision of urban infrastructure to support new house building and it is by no means clear the local Councils and their ratepayers can continue to borrow to fund these assets. Private rental housing growing and under stressAbout half of New Zealand adults owned their home in 2013. The private rental housing market appears to be under considerable supply side pressure on account of high house construction costs, high house prices and low yields. Over 70% of the additional 150,000 households formed over the past decade are likely to have become tenants and recent strong population growth has consolidated this strong demand for private rental accommodation. Signs of stress within this market include rents beginning to rise faster than wages and salaries perhaps twice as fast in some places anddeclining turnover of tenancies as people remain in the housing they have. Rising levels of homelessness and continuing rates of housing related poverty are also further evidence of this stress. Regrettably, there are no short-term fixes to these problems.4A Stocktake of New Zealands Housing February 2018Housing insecurity increases for Mori and Pacific peoplesRecent housing policies have failed to address the housing problems of Mori and Pacific peoples. Rising housing costs have contributed to declining home ownership rates, greater housing instability, and Mori and Pacific peoples living in poor quality housing. By 2013, Mori and Pacific homeownership rates had declined relatively rapidly to 28% for Mori and 19% for Pacific peoples, compared with 57% for Europeans. Mori landowners have a range of spiritual, cultural and economic aspirations for their whenua including housing. Despite the apparent availability of land owned by Mori, there are challenges related to achieving the right to build on multiply owned land, the provision of infrastructure, access to finance, and central and local planning rules.3,4Reductions in the number of state houses have led to major shifts in tenure patterns for those on low incomes. In the renting population, between 1986 and 2013, the proportion of Mori renting state housing dropped by 29 percentage points compared to 16 points overall. As state housing has become less available, unaffordable rentals in the private market have become the only option available for many families. Again in therenting population, the proportion renting in the private sector rose rapidly from 1986, but forMori, the percentage increased from 41% to 77%. In 1986, around half of Mori children lived inan owner-occupied dwelling, but by 2013, the proportion was only 39%.5These trends are also clear for Pacific peoples. Between 1986 and 2013, the proportion of Pacific peoples renting state housing dropped 27 percentage points and the proportion renting in the private sector increased from 27% to 56%. The proportion of Pacific children who lived in an owner-occupied dwelling dropped from around half in 1986 to 28% in 2013. Private rental tenants generally pay a much higher proportion of their disposable household income on housing than owner-occupiers or social housing tenants. Because rising housing costs are increasingly impoverishing low-income households, one response to these costs is household crowding, which adds to the serious risks of infectious diseases and hospitalisation, and another isincreased rates of homelessness. Concerted effective policy action is needed to increase home ownership and rental security for Mori and Pacific households.5The future of the Accommodation Supplement The previous Governments decision to increase maximum payments under the Accommodation Supplement (AS) programme was overdue and the present Governments decision to press aheadwith these increases, in April 2018, is sensible under the circumstances of rising rents and increasing levels of housing-related poverty. However, such policy adjustments are unlikely to offermuch relief and cannot be seen as a medium-term solution to the clear limitations of the AS as one of the main housing affordability policy instruments. The announced changes will eventually put a further $500 million annually into the AS programme and more than $400 million into private rental housing markets. The extent to which the AS is effectively a tenants or landlords subsidy is unclear, but will be partly determined by the available rental supply and will be tested by changes in rents during mid-2018 as this increased expenditure feeds through. The supply side pressure in private rental housing markets suggests that much of this increase will be soaked up in even higher rents. If this is the case then the need for a radical review of the AS will become apparent. 5A Stocktake of New Zealands Housing February 2018Tenants rights need strengtheningPrivate rental housing tends to be of poorer quality and the tenure of such housing is more tenuousthan home ownership. In the absence of any regulatory enforcement and as demand hasout-stripped supply, there have been few incentives for landlords to maintain or improve the quality of the
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