What, specifically, do you want?
I think reasonable people could disagree about the Independent Hearings Panel’s recommendations on the Auckland Unitary Plan. In fact, a large number of generally reasonable people have spent a lot of the last two years disagreeing about the appropriate shape of the plan.…
73 Comments Guest post: When Nimbyism rules angels become homeless
This is a cross-post of an article written by Transportblog reader and passionate Cantabrian Brendon Harre. Brendon takes a look at New Zealand’s attitudes around housing development:
The inspiration for the title of this paper comes from an economist –Eric Crampton writing about Auckland’s housing crisis.…
Slicing the housing cake: Developer profits versus capital gains
Who benefits from enabling housing development? And who bears the costs of restricting it?
One common refrain is that reducing regulations to enable housing will deliver higher profits to developers, while disadvantaging existing homeowners, who must contend with more people living in the neighbourhood. …
Remember the last time house prices crashed 40%?
More commentary on this later on, but for now I’m just going to drop in some data.
Former Reserve Bank chair Arthur Grimes commented last week in The Spinoff:
In March 2016, the REINZ Auckland median house price reached $820,000. Four years previously, it was $495,000 – that’s a 66% increase in 4 years.…
Mid-week reading: strategy games, housing politics, fossil fuel subsidies, and the benefits of bike lanes
Welcome back to mid-week reading, which is (happily) becoming a more intermittent feature. One of the most interesting things I’ve recently read was Jonathan McCalmont’s exploration of anarchist scholar James C Scott’s arguments about the way that governments interact with their people: “Seeing like a state: why strategy games make us think and behave like brutal psychopaths“:
Cloaked as they were in the trappings of religion and medieval warfare, it was all too easy to overlook the morally dubious nature of the games’ relationship between players and in-game characters.…
Housing Issues Hotting Up
Housing issues in Auckland have become a fairly constant news piece in recent years and the affordability issue has become louder and louder. And it’s not just people wanting to buy a house either but also for renters as rental prices rise too, something that is particularly tough for those on low incomes.…
Apartments and housing affordability
The NZ Herald’s been running a series on Auckland’s housing affordability crisis. The articles thus far have ranged from thoughtful and thought-provoking to downright imbecilic – such as a mortgage broker’s suggestion that young people could afford homes if they gave up their Sky subscription.…
Midweek reading: Road pricing and safety, urban-rural, the history of California, and trees
Starting this week I’m trying out a new feature: a midweek post rounding up some new articles on transport and urbanism. (Time for writing more substantive posts has been a bit tight lately.) The themes will be familiar to regular readers.…
A brief explanation of what just happened with the Unitary Plan
Over the past week Transportblog has published several posts on the brouhaha (or is that kerfuffle?) about Auckland Council’s position on Unitary Plan rezoning.
However, we haven’t really taken a higher-altitude view on the issue. So here’s a quick summary.
The underlying issue is that Auckland’s home prices are really, really high, and rising rapidly.…
Tauranga: Sunshine, sprawl, and high house prices
Back in 2014 I wrote a short paper exploring how population density had evolved in New Zealand and Australian cities. Among other things, the paper provided a rough estimate of the degree to which various cities were going “up” or “out” – i.e.…
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