Dr Rebecca Kiddle
In this opinion piece, SJA Co-Director Becky Kiddle argues that a home shouldn’t be a reward for doing well in life; it’s what makes doing well possible. So why is state housing land being sold 17 days before the election, with barely a word about public housing on the campaign trail?
The sale of state housing land to a private developer – just 17 days before an election – should have people up in arms. And yet there has been very little focus on public housing this election campaign despite it being a part of the solution for those doing it particularly hard in this cost of living crisis.
A few weeks ago I was invited to respond to a Wellington Bays candidate event organised by the Strathmore Housing Action group, a group of indefatigable YIMBYS who oppose the sale of local public land that previously contained public housing.
The Green, Labour and NZ First candidates (Julie Anne Genter, Craig Renney and Gerald Warner) all opposed the sale of the land. And the sell-off seems particularly inappropriate given it will occur less than three weeks before the election, tying the hands of any new government that might want to restore state housing in the area. This is part of a wider sell-off under this government, in which 36 hectares of land are being sold to the highest bidder. This equates to the cancellation of 212 Kāinga Ora state housing development projects which could have housed thousands of people.
Why does state housing matter? Because a home should not be a reward for doing well in life. It is, in fact, the thing that makes doing well possible.
Think about what it takes to hold down a job, get a child to school every morning, manage an illness, or care for an ageing parent. Each of these things assumes you have somewhere stable and secure to sleep each night. If you remove that certainty, everything else starts to wobble.
There are parties with policies on state housing. Labour has pledged nearly $3 billion for new state houses and promising at least 6000 additional social housing places over four years. National is focused on cutting state housing operational costs and increasing the Income-Related Rent Subsidy tenant contribution from 25% - 30% next year. The Greens propose a large-scale state build programme to clear the social housing waitlist within five years, ACT favours deeper public-private partnerships utilising community housing providers and the like to deliver social housing, The Opportunities Party would focus on targeted Kāinga Ora Builds to construct the exact mix of housing regions require to clear waitlists and New Zealand First want everyone to be homeowners so would develop shared equity models as tools to enable people to buy their own homes.
There’s been hardly any debate about those ideas. But there should be.
Here are six key reasons, then, why we should care about public housing, and why we should take it into account when voting on November 7.
1. Public housing fills a gap the market won’t
The private market does not reliably house those on low incomes. This is not to cast shade on private developers or landlords, rather it’s a case of numbers not adding up.
Building and renting homes to people who can only afford well below market rent isn’t profitable, so private supply at that end of the market is more likely to be insecure or poor quality, or simply not exist at all. The logic of the tax cuts to landlords early on in this current government’s term was that those cuts would flow through and lower private tenant rents. Yet most commentators, including The Treasury itself, say the tax cuts had very little effect; rather, rent levels rest on tenants’ income and ability to pay. Public housing provides homes directly, without relying on tax-cut subsidies that can actually be counterproductive.
2. Stable housing underpins everything else and saves money elsewhere
Security of tenure and affordable rent are linked to better health (less overcrowding, damp, and cold-related illness), better educational outcomes for children who aren’t moving schools repeatedly, and steadier employment. Wellington based Community Housing Provider Te Toi Mahana has found that the social return on investment is $3 for every $1 spent on social housing. Homelessness and housing insecurity are expensive. Housing is where most other social policy either works or fails, the impact of which shows up in emergency accommodation, hospital admissions, prison, and child protection costs. Decent permanent housing is usually cheaper than managing the consequences of its absence, if we take a systems-based and long-term view.
3. Public housing provision can address inequity
Housing systems tend to reproduce existing disadvantage, including the effects of land loss experienced by Māori in particular, discrimination in rental markets and intergenerational exclusion from ownership. Public housing is one of the few levers the state holds directly to counter those effects: it works to help equalise the base from which people launch their lives.
4. Public housing can shape the wider market
A large public housing stock can moderate and dampen rents, keep the building and construction sectors going through downturns when private developers pull back, and set standards for quality and energy performance, potentially even bringing down the cost of solar energy, etc., for the wider private market.
5. Public housing can shape the wider city
State housing enables governments to ensure lower-income households are able to live in well-located neighbourhoods near jobs and services, rather than pushing these already disadvantaged households to the urban edge.
6. Public housing is a long-term public asset
Unlike rent subsidies, which are a recurring cost for government, public homes retain their value and keep serving households for generations. Arguments will always rage about the pros and cons of state-owned assets. But if we understand housing to be the basis on which all other parts of life can happen well, then surely the argument follows that a good stock of public housing is best retained in public ownership to enable good things for those who have very little choice in life. We need a much more sophisticated cost-benefit analysis approach that sees housing as infrastructure that’s of benefit over time not only to us but also to our mokopuna. It is part of a wider system that, if operating well, supports better lives.