Posts by BenWilson
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Steve Barnes,
I think you probably meant "non resident foreign ownership" anyway, right? Because it would be pretty hypocritical thing for an old Pom with multiple property assets and a Mexican mistress in NZ to be saying shouldn't be allowed :-)
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Steve Barnes,
I really think foreign ownership of land is the wrong way to go,for any sovereign state.
I think it should be limited at the least. In the long run, there's no way that gradual racial integration can happen if foreigners are blocked from owning at all. And in bringing money here, something good is being done. But it can't be without limit or caveat. The rate at which we accept foreign capital ownership should roughly coincide with the rate at which we accept foreign immigration of their physical bodies. Then we have people that are investing a whole lot more than speculative hot money into the country. They're bringing their whole selves with it, their labour, their knowledge, their skills, their willingness to work, their culture. At a gradual rate, it gives everyone a chance to keep up.
We do have limits on the total number of possible immigrants for a reason. The nation would quite simply not cope with unlimited bodies coming here. But when it's happening economically, the damage is harder to see. It shouldn't be hard to see, it should be utterly transparent, and controlled to reasonable limits.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Alfie,
It's amazing, really. A Herald reporter who actually did a little bit of research. I came away from the Armstrong article a little better informed than I entered it. If only that could be a model for the rest of the Herald's commentary team.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Swan,
Except that one fundamentally affects housing costs (i.e. rent), the other merely affects asset prices.
When you own a house, or aim to own one, those are the same thing. The cost of owning a more expensive house is a larger mortgage. You’d have to be an economist not to realize this. Furthermore, if you buy a larger asset, it’s usually on the expectation of larger future gains, so asset prices do fundamentally have an effect on rents too. Which kind of explains why it costs more to rent more expensive houses. Again, this is not something I would expect an economist to understand. To them, it’s all in the wash, and money doesn’t really exist. Bankruptcy is just pre-greatness.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Nah he doesn't have a special trump card, he just calls misere every time and dares the Liberal Intelligentsia to outbid him so he can send them out the back door. It's amazing how many tricks you can lose with a good hand playing that way. He'd chuck the joker and both bowers out in the kitty just to play misere against the LI one more time.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Sacha,
I like his checklist as a starting point, but as he notes, there's plenty more possibilities.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to David Hood,
Yup, it's pretty glib stuff. Just because Ponsonby's extraordinary growth isn't the fault entirely of mainland Chinese doesn't really prove anything at all about what Salmond's research shows. It's not to the point at all. The aspirational person looking to get into the Auckland property market isn't looking at Ponsonby anyway, and haven't since the 20th century. But getting priced out of suburbs like Albany and New Lynn are experiences entirely new to people trying to grasp what it is to be getting started in Auckland property. Getting priced out by foreign capital influxes is something that even living Maori wouldn't have personally experienced, even if the bitter taste of having lost their inheritances that way is still with them.
This is quite aside from the point that Rudman offers no evidence at all to support his assumption that foreign capital hasn't also become a factor even in Ponsonby. How would he know? By not noticing Chinese faces on his street??? Really? That's part of the point of Salmond's analysis - that it's not easy to know who owns what here at all.
It's also aside from the frustration many people who at least roughly do understand how to model property values must feel - that all debate about it boils down to silly single issue rebuttals. When value is a function of a number of variables, then of course it's not a function of only one variable. That's always a straw man. The argument needs a lot more sophistication in it than that, but it seldom gets it because understanding such modeling isn't simple. So we get a lot of opinions presented as facts, the feelings of real estate agents, of speculators, of economists, of the PM.
We get babyish rebuttals like "It isn't capital influx, it's a lack of supply". Rather than looking at the possibility that it's both (and a lot of other things besides) and one is a whole lot easier to solve than the other. You can legislate to slow capital influx but to increase supply significantly you need one hell of a lot of money. More money than the government even has at all, probably. And to legislate to encourage supply is possible, but it's a whole lot more of an ask because it's a vast bundle of different laws across multiple bodies, and many of those laws exist for sensible reasons.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Kumara Republic,
My inner Machiavellian predicts this move will reinforce the Greens’ double-digit poll ratings, as it would probably attract Labour’s liberal elements. While Labour itself has concluded the Missing Million is a lost cause, so it focuses on Winstonites and the Waitakere men & women who might have voted for Helen once
I've got a similar little guy talking in my inner ear, and I'm thinking the loss of the most liberal elements will be less than the gains from people concerned about Chinese capital flooding property here. Because most of those liberals already left. And in switching to Green, they're not entirely lost - they become backing from a coalition partner.
But where the others come from, I don't know for sure. The missing million is not necessarily homogeneous. There's a never-have-voted disenfranchised group, but there's also there could be a lot who just stopped voting Labour and couldn't quite stomach the alternatives.
I definitely know more than a few that express sympathies to Winston, who formerly would probably have voted Labour or Alliance. I don't think they go so far as to actually vote Winston, though. It's an outlet for those who don't feel a connection to what the Clark Govt was about.
But the never-do-vote group might find some appeal in at least addressing the financial property lock-out that's happening in Auckland. More is needed, actual plans to do something about it. Because while National have fiddled as the chances of affordable housing here burned, it's still something Labour never did anything about either.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
Are you actually happy with Labour being a basket case ? If so, why ? I’d love to know.
No, I dispute that they're a basket case. They're still twice the party that the Greens are, even at their absolute worst, in terms of support. The perception of them fucking up the messaging is one I think I'll wait for some polling to judge. That I personally don't like the messaging is no indication of anything at all. I'm not a sample. I don't even vote for them.
As a Green, I’m sick of having “WTF Is Wrong With Labour ?” conversations
Me too. Hence, I end this comment, right here.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Swan,
Yeah but the route that asset price bubbles take when they affect the economy is via financial instability and is always preceded by strong credit growth.
Swan, I told you that the scenario you propose would literally wipe off my entire net worth. That's affecting my economy right there. And I'm one of the lucky ones, with quite a high equity proportion. Most of the property owners in my age bracket that I know are far more leveraged. These people would be not just affected, they would be bankrupted. We're talking about middle class people with good jobs who would have negative equity. If the bank didn't foreclose them on the way down to zero equity, they would be literally stuck in place, unable to sell until property rose 50% again, because if they did, what they'd have left to spend would be hundreds of thousands of dollars in the negative. There are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people in this situation. It's quite ludicrous to suggest that an outright collapse of that magnitude would not be highly destructive to our economic wellbeing. It certainly won't "come out in the wash".
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