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So, now NZers will not be able to afford to live in their own country.[0] The mega rich should buy sailing vessels and live on those and leave the housing pric

So, now NZers will not be able to afford to live in their own country.[0] The mega rich should buy sailing vessels and live on those and leave the housing prices affordable to the rest of us. [0] Or at least not own a house.

dave_sullivan 10y ago
> The mega rich should buy sailing vessels and live on those and leave the housing prices affordable to the rest of us. If housing prices are unaffordable, blame property developers and/or government. If they are unaffordable, that's usually a market signal to build more housing because "all these property developers in city X are making lots of money, let's build there too", which lowers the prices as more people get in, etc. Unless "Ah, but dealing with government there will cost more money than there is profit in the development, let's not build there" Also, the term unaffordable is relative. Downtown San Francisco is very expensive. It's not "unaffordable" because people have purchased most of those units. And that's just how markets work. You've got a set amount of X (like habitable living space), you've got a certain amount of people that want that thing with a certain amount of money to spend, put it to an auction to determine a fair market price. What's wrong with this equation exactly? Blaming people for outbidding you in buying a house is ridiculous, even if they outbid you because they simply have more money.
- pitaj 10y ago
  Yeah, this is what doesn't make sense to me. All of these people blaming the buyers for buying and the politicians for not passing laws to disincentivize them from doing so. The solution is to build more housing. Full stop.
mattnewton 10y ago
I think that rising populations and income inequality should work together to make home ownership harder for the majority of people in the developed world.
- drabiega 10y ago
  The other piece of the puzzle is infrastructure spending. There's plenty of mostly empty land left in the world. Despite the old adage, building transport networks really is like creating new real estate.
antome 10y ago
As a NZ university student, I see this all around me. As the youngest in an old family, we got what would now be considered a middle-class home on a working-class budget in the early 90s. All the other students I know with working-class backgrounds have family homes well beyond the city, forcing them to live like broke arts students in broken-down shoebox apartments. Even middle-class students tend to have "compromise" family homes, either big homes at the city outskirts or tiny homes in the city centre. As you may have noticed, families who have owned homes since the 90s are doing pretty well for themselves. They also happen to be the majority voting bloc. The opposition parties are going to have to do some serious politicking to break through this firewall.

dave_sullivan 10y ago

> The mega rich should buy sailing vessels and live on those and leave the housing prices affordable to the rest of us. If housing prices are unaffordable, blame property developers and/or government. If they are unaffordable, that's usually a market signal to build more housing because "all these property developers in city X are making lots of money, let's build there too", which lowers the prices as more people get in, etc. Unless "Ah, but dealing with government there will cost more money than there is profit in the development, let's not build there" Also, the term unaffordable is relative. Downtown San Francisco is very expensive. It's not "unaffordable" because people have purchased most of those units. And that's just how markets work. You've got a set amount of X (like habitable living space), you've got a certain amount of people that want that thing with a certain amount of money to spend, put it to an auction to determine a fair market price. What's wrong with this equation exactly? Blaming people for outbidding you in buying a house is ridiculous, even if they outbid you because they simply have more money.

pitaj 10y ago
Yeah, this is what doesn't make sense to me. All of these people blaming the buyers for buying and the politicians for not passing laws to disincentivize them from doing so. The solution is to build more housing. Full stop.

mattnewton 10y ago

I think that rising populations and income inequality should work together to make home ownership harder for the majority of people in the developed world.

drabiega 10y ago
The other piece of the puzzle is infrastructure spending. There's plenty of mostly empty land left in the world. Despite the old adage, building transport networks really is like creating new real estate.

antome 10y ago

As a NZ university student, I see this all around me. As the youngest in an old family, we got what would now be considered a middle-class home on a working-class budget in the early 90s. All the other students I know with working-class backgrounds have family homes well beyond the city, forcing them to live like broke arts students in broken-down shoebox apartments. Even middle-class students tend to have "compromise" family homes, either big homes at the city outskirts or tiny homes in the city centre. As you may have noticed, families who have owned homes since the 90s are doing pretty well for themselves. They also happen to be the majority voting bloc. The opposition parties are going to have to do some serious politicking to break through this firewall.