When it comes to rental housing, "we’re accustomed to hearing the side of the story from the 120,000-odd landlords in this country. It’s time to hear from some of the 1.4 million renters", writes Chlöe Swarbrick.
When it comes to rental housing, "we’re accustomed to hearing the side of the story from the 120,000-odd landlords in this country. It’s time to hear from some of the 1.4 million renters", writes Chlöe Swarbrick.
Opinion by Chlöe Swarbrick
OPINION:
Here’s a fun game* for election year: any time a politician uses the word “economy”, ask them to define what they’re talking about.
What the Greens are talking about when we talk about the economy is all of us human beings, the planet we’re on, the resources we use, things we create and rules we put in place to govern all of that. Those rules currently incentivise and privilege land speculation, wealth hoarding, environmental devastation and short-term thinking. It’s why we’re so focused on changing them: none of this is sustainable.
Most of our Parliament, however, tends to treat the economy as a self-determining God. Something to sacrifice to when it’s angry. Something to serve, as opposed to something that’s supposed to serve us and the ecosystem it and all of us rely on for survival.
There are not many better examples of where this bizarre “economy” dogma tends to play out than with housing.
After world wars, the United Nations came together to agree on basic human rights seen as necessary to enable functional democracies and prevent future escalation to violence and atrocity. One of those basic human rights was adequate housing.
We have ample, consistent and excruciating evidence that leaving these rights for sale to the highest bidder has undercut this basic human right.
Many politicians to this day trumpet the origins of their “self-made” story in state housing; the secure homes once guaranteed by the Government, serving as the foundation of success which helped many families. The irony seems to be lost every time.
Enormous numbers of those state houses were sold off in the 1990s by the then-National Government. They argued they would cushion the blow to low-income New Zealanders by creating the Accommodation Supplement, to top up rent payments in the private market.
Extensive local research has shown that instead of supporting renters into housing, the Accommodation Supplement has served largely to bid up the cost of rentals.
Rents, it transpires, aren’t just the magical nexus of Economics 101′s supply and demand curve; they are not “pass-through” costs. It’s why we see rents increase off the back of Student Allowance increases – the quality of housing hasn’t improved, but the capacity to pay has while the need for the basic human right to a home hasn’t evaporated.
In 2021, a groundbreaking political consensus was reached between Labour and National to see more, and denser, housing built in our largest cities and towns. Both voted down proposed Green amendments that would have protected trees, enabled mixed use (for ease of opening up coffee shops and medical centres) and encouraged better energy usage.
National has now not only decided to rip all of that up in favour of the continued sprawl to gridlock Auckland and decimate our fertile soils necessary for food security, but promise to roll back the few, small wins for renters. Their housing spokesperson has called these protections, like Healthy Homes Standards and the end to no-cause evictions, minute in the international context, a “war on landlords”.
The Greens have launched a campaign for renters to share their stories of New Zealand's housing market. Photo / Doug Sherring
We hear a lot about and from those landlords. From speculators who are promising to sell their n’th house if the Government wins another next term, or buy another property to speculate on if National clinches power.
Whenever the Greens raise this country’s one and a half million renters and their rights, we are immediately met with accusations of attacking landlords. This perhaps helps make the case in point about where political power lies through deeply entrenched assumptions about who the economy is supposed to work for.
That’s why this week we launched a campaign for renters to share their stories directly. To cut through the noise and the bluster and make a collective impact that somehow even all of the crystal-clear evidence hasn’t yet been able to.
We’re accustomed to the side of the story from the 120,000-odd landlords in this country. It’s time to hear from the nearly 11 times as many tenants – the 1.4 million New Zealanders Statistics New Zealand tells us spend more of their income on smaller, damper and older housing.
Political change doesn’t come from nowhere. It is found every day, with the voices Parliament is willing to listen to. We’re about to make it impossible for them to ignore renters.
