Nick Smith's catch cry in the House is continually, "We are building more houses now than ever before in NZ."
The figures do not ring true when house consents have dropped from 39,800 in 1973 to 24,700+ in 2014 with a population growth in that time of 50 per cent. This is not taking into account the 60,000+ migrants, most of whom are pouring into Auckland every year.
House prices are increasing in Auckland at 25 per cent each year and is taking almost 10 times the average wage to finance a loan. An urban land boundary has led this with escalating land prices and land banking by greedy speculators and developers, the exorbitant cost of infrastructure, and resistance (and rightly so) to density and height.
Greed from house sales has also led to cutting out the "ordinary first new home owners" as speculators buy multiple houses, charge higher and higher rents, write off income tax to maintenance ( non- existent) and then complain, as one gentleman has recently, that he did not double his money when on- selling!
What did he produce in that time, for the good of the growth economy of NZ? Zilch! Money for jam!
