[Opinion] A solution for NZ's housing crisis

Last year Wealth Morning interviewed CAP, a nationwide group dealing with debt and poverty –housing cost pressures were found to be the key cause of deprivation.

Many people after paying rent, and even mortgages, are left with barely anything to live on – while New Zealand’s homelessness is the worst in the OECD.

The stats

• Almost one in 100 New Zealanders are homeless.
• Home ownership in Auckland dropped to 59.4% of households in the 2018 census (it was 72.7% in 1991). This is likely to be even lower now.
• For the past five years, house prices have been rising much faster than wages – with Auckland’s median price in mid-2020 now 11.5x median income.
• Auckland is now more “unaffordable” than San Francisco or London. And every urban housing market in New Zealand is “severely unaffordable”, according to the 2020 Demographia Housing Affordability Survey.
• A debt time bomb is in the making, particularly for the young. Mortgage brokers tell us they routinely see debt-to-income ratios of 6x or more. The legal maximum for most home lending in the United Kingdom is 4.5.