Editorial: Home Truths - Stories of Kiwis locked out of the housing market

A house goes up for auction at Hobsonville Point in Auckland where most in attendance will be helpless observers even before the reserve price is met. Photo / Jason Dorday, File

EDITORIAL

New Zealand is in a housing crisis as property prices rise faster than pay packets and Kiwis increasingly find it hard to buy a home in our cities.

A typical New Zealand worker now needs nine years to save a deposit, while an Aucklander needs 11 years – leading the nation's biggest city to be regularly ranked among the developed world's most unaffordable.

Affordability, as measured by the average house price to household income, hit its worst point in at least 17 years recently, as house prices jumped more than 20 per cent since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic one year ago.

New Zealand now has the most inflated housing prices in the developed world, according to a Bloomberg study, ranking us top on all three measures of price growth, prices compared to incomes and prices compared to rents.

There are fears the hot property market will hurt the nation's economy long-term and widen inequality. A third of New Zealanders now rent and the proportion of 30- to 40-year-olds who own a home has been falling for decades.

That's why we are today relaunching Home Truths, a series on affordable housing which first highlighted the problem and pressed politicians for action in 2016.

Today, three out of four kids are moving home at least once before the age of 8 as a growing number of families shift from one rental to another as the dream of home ownership becomes more and more an impossible one.

Over coming weeks and months, we'll analyse the causes of the crisis, hear from the many New Zealanders who feel locked out of the housing market and explore possible solutions.