Set housing outcomes not outputs

The NZ Initiative released:

“Our cities have been meeting their housing targets for years while house prices kept climbing,” said Dr Benno Blaschke, Research Fellow at The New Zealand Initiative. “The housing targets gave politicians and communities a number to fight over while ignoring everything underneath.”

New research from The New Zealand Initiative, Beyond Targets, proposes a better way to hold councils to account: replace housing targets with price indicators. They tell planners whether people have real and affordable choices about where to live and build, or whether rules are forcing people and businesses into bidding wars over scarce permissions, jacking up prices.

This seems sensible to me. An outcome (where practical) is the better target, than an output.