Early in the housing crisis, a professor of economics wrote an article for this paper questioning whether there was a problem. "The last time I looked," he wrote, "everybody had a house."
It did not really matter, he argued, whether they owned the house or rented it, they met the cost. That was some years ago and he might not say that now.
As our "Home Truths" series reports today, almost one in seven Aucklanders no longer "have a house" they can occupy as a couple or as parents and children. They have moved in with relatives or other families. If they are a couple still living with parents or sharing a household with other people, they are putting off having children.
Retirement Commissioner Diane Maxwell believes the cost of housing is reducing the birth rate just as an ageing population is pushing up pension and healthcare costs. That is one of the long-term and less obvious consequences of housing costs in Auckland, and now other cities, that keep racing further out of reach of average incomes.
Until recently, the crisis was confined to home ownership. Rents in Auckland had not been rising at the same rate, in fact rentals had been a perverse beneficiary of a tax system that favours property investment. Investors usually buy a house for its expected capital gain and since they can write off operating losses on the property against their taxable income, rent did not need to cover all its costs. But more recently rent has been rising too, perhaps as consequence of the Government's tightening of tax rules.
