Brash on land prices

Don Brash writes in the NZ Herald:

Of course Dr Hosking is right if the supply of land is fixed, as indeed it has been by council decision. But it doesn’t have to be fixed. At the moment, less than 1 per cent of New Zealand’s area is urbanised. We are one of the least densely populated countries in the world. The council has quite deliberately chosen to make land expensive.

The price of land in Auckland is not an accident. It is, as Don says, deliberate.

And the consequences of that decision are disastrous, socially and economically.

It’s disastrous socially because for most low and middle-income families, buying a house in Auckland is now not even remotely possible, and for those families who do make the attempt, it almost inevitably means both parents working outside the home. Most low and middle-income families can’t even make the attempt, and often live in over-crowded, poor quality rental accommodation.

Don asks:

Why is it possible to buy 500sq m sections on the outskirts of Houston for $40,000, whereas 400sq m sections on the outskirts of Auckland cost $400,000? The answer lies simply in the fact that in Houston there are relatively relaxed attitudes towards using land on the outskirts of the city, whereas in Auckland that has been prohibited.

Town planners turn their nose up at Houston, and claim it is an awful place to live. However families from all over the US are heading there – because they can buy a reasonably sized home at a decent price there.

The very first report of the New Zealand Productivity Commission was on the cost of housing. The commission concluded that there were various reasons why housing is so expensive in New Zealand – but overwhelmingly the biggest single factor is the price of land, and that in turn has been a quite deliberate policy choice.

There are multiple factors, but ignoring land supply is ignoring the elephant in the room.

Dr Hosking mentioned that four of the five cities in the Mercer quality of living survey are “intensified”. And the fifth is Auckland. What he didn’t note was that Auckland is already more intensified than one of the other five, namely Vancouver. In fact, according to the Demographia survey of many hundreds of urban areas around the world, no city in the United States, Canada or Australia has more people per square kilometre than Auckland has now.

Again, a deliberate choice by the Council. And the fact Auckland is one of the most expensive cities in the world to buy a home is deliberately linked to that. And politicians from the left near universally are opposed to doing anything meaningful about it.