“They allowed the perfect storm, and that’s successive governments, UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Leilani Farha told the Guardian during a visit to New Zealand this year. The United Nations has described the housing shortage as “a human rights crisis”.

“There’s still nearly 75,000 who have lost their jobs, really tough for them but for the other more than 2 million workers things are pretty good.”Īccording to the recent Demographia International survey, New Zealand has one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the world, and over the past decade homelessness has increased to more than 40,000, or 1 in 100 Kiwis. The pandemic tipped New Zealand into a sharp recession with a record 12.2% fall in GDP in the quarter to September but the loosening of regulations on mortgage lending has aided the recovery and helped those still in work, Eaqub said. “And they are kind of right,” says Eaqub.

The lot of Generation Rent has just got a lot worse.”įirst-time buyers who reason that if they can’t buy a house now they never will, are in the market, too. This just worsens everything we have been experiencing for the last 30 years. “For first-home buyers and young people, it gets further out of reach. “It’s good for people who own houses but it’s terrible from an equity perspective,” he said. In some small towns, house prices have increased by 40% on the back of rental yields as high as 10%, says Eaqub. The measure was aimed at encouraging investment in new houses to ease a chronic shortage but was lifted to stimulate the market during Covid-19. Investors have been given a big advantage after the requirement to have a 30% deposit to buy an existing house was removed, he said. Shamubeel Eaqub, an independent economist and author of Generation Rent, said mortgage lending was showing record growth and most of it was chasing existing houses, driving up the price.

Growing Apart by Shamubeel Eaqub