Posts by A S
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As such, I would think a $3-4b package is pretty steep, even if it's phased in to get us there. The reduced tax take would need to see some pretty big cuts in government provided services...
There is also an important distinction between government spending and actual government services delivered that gets glossed over a lot. There isn't any particular reason why government spending couldn't be reduced to some degree without any change to service delivery levels.
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In relation to the lack of consequences thing, I agree. I can recall quite a few impulses of my own that were not acted on, purely due to the liklihood of getting smacked upside the head by the owner of the property I was tempted to do various things to. In those cases, the consequence outweighed the reward.
Perhaps part of the problem now is to do with the perception that the teens everyone is talking about are well aware that they have 'rights', but apparently only a limited understanding of the 'responsibilities' that go hand in hand with them. The reward vs. consequence curve for modern kids is skewed a lot more towards the reward, which is quite probably not a good thing in the long run.
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just like the bloke who murdered that teenager
Pre-judging the trial outcome just a little bit here?
Having recently made the transition from not having property, to having property, and having recently been doing those normal DIY things like painting, mending fences etc. I have to say I would indeed be mightily annoyed if some toerag decided my nice off-white fence should be emblazoned with their moronic 'brand'.
Not, I hasten to add to the point of attacking them with a weapon other than hurtful words about hoodie wearing muppets, but certainly to the point of wishing them a painful time in the uttermost depths of hades, or perhaps the catching of a particularly nasty STI.
A particularly interesting piece of research would be to see just how many taggers homes are emblazoned with tags? If taggers emblazon their own homes, then there may be something to the brand argument, if not, then perhaps another driver is at work (possibly even just destruction for its own sake - a fair proportion of us were teenage boys once and remember this motivation - although most of us managed to resist it...)
Perhaps a fitting form of punishment for taggers would be to allow the taggers victims to come and tag the taggers home.... Imagine the rep hit you'd take having a bunch of crusty middle aged peoples tags on the fence outside yo crib....
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<quote>The basic tenet remains. If you can't afford it, don't buy it.
If you can't afford and buy it anyway (regardless of motivation for doing so), then you really don't have anyone to blame but yourself if you suddenly find yourself in trouble.<quote>
Well, yes and no. "Somewhere to live" isn't a luxury good, and the scarcity isn't artificial. "Don't buy" is great advice until ownership drops to the point where the only defence against having your income rack-rented out of you is government legislation, with various attendant problems (see: New York).
Somewhere to live is indeed a necessity. Owning that somewhere isn't.
Most of this is moot. As the pundits are finally figuring out, we are looking down the barrel of a fairly long spell of house price decline/stagnation, which will go a reasonable way to dealing with the issue of affordability, as wages will eventually start to catch up with the house price spike.
The odds of rack-rents emerging in NZ are relatively minimal, and are now even less so because the market is looking so grim. Affordability will improve, and the middle-class couples feeling left behind will be able to buy a house (although as is the case now, they should given up any thought of kids or study, or anything else that might impact on their ability to service a debt that requires dual incomes).
As many have pointed out, land costs are indeed one part of the issue, but they are only one part. On top of that is tax regimes, migration patterns, an ageing population, coupled with declining fertility, and of course a lack of investment in decent transport infrastructure that means living outside cities is not an option.
In addition to looking at all of those, hopefully someone will also look at how to deal with the compliance side of the equation as well, which quite a few people in the construction sector are suggesting has played a big part in the massive increases in construction costs in the last ten years or so. With costs running ever closer to $2k per square metre, it doesn't take a very big house to wipe out most peoples options around building.
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The basic tenet remains. If you can't afford it, don't buy it.
If you can't afford and buy it anyway (regardless of motivation for doing so), then you really don't have anyone to blame but yourself if you suddenly find yourself in trouble.
Blaming everyone else for a bad decision will not in any way, shape or form change the outcome for those who have over extended.
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But it's not the bank's fault, it's government. They set the rules around debt creation, and our government choose to use a set of rules that can't control debt powered inflation of capital value.
This might sound quaint, but the bursting housing bubble is neither the fault of banks, or of government. The fault lies with those who buy and sell houses, and in particular those who commit themselves to precarious levels of debt in the expectation of capital gain, thus driving a speculative bubble.
If as an individual I make a reckless/high risk investment decision, financially over-commit and then come a cropper, I do not (and nor should I) have anyone to blame but myself, and nor should I complain about the unfairness of it all. After all, I certainly wouldn't be comlaining about it if I'd made 80% capital gains would I?
Any speculatory chickens coming home to roost should be left where they belong and speculators that have gone under shouldn't be bailed out regardless of how loud they squeal.
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Nonsense. That only applies if borrowing is unavailable to you, but available to everyone else. Without banks housing price inflation would not have been artificially stoked by those who have the most to gain. The banks decide how much they will lend and, in a market of limited supply, that determines the cost of housing.
And there I was thinking that laws of supply and demand generally had a greater impact on price... Just because the banks offer something, doesn't mean people have to take it.
When we bought last year, the banks were falling over themselves to lend money. In fact we could have bought a bigger plance in one of the better 'burbs (or even commissioned a ghastly McMansion with all the mod cons), but actually engaged our brains and thought about the quality of life we wanted and then opted for a much cheaper place in a much less desirable suburb (with payments that were realistic).
At the end of the day, if you can't afford something, and you buy it anyway, then you really don't have much of a leg to stand on if things go pear shaped. Caveat emptor and all that...
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HousingNZ now prefers to "pepperpot" rather than build entire neighbourhoods of state houses. But also there's the fact that Hobsonville was planned several years ago, before affordable housing became such a big issue. Hopefully they'll be thinking about how to put more affordable homes in there, and hopefully the tamaki development will include even more.
I'd respectfully submit that the comparison to "pepperpotting" would not be relevant to Hobsonville if it was a settlement of affordable housing. Hobsonville is a wasted opportunity, where it could have been established as primarily affordable housing, with a sprinkling of state houses (as is the wont of HNZ). This would not have created slums and would in fact have delivered against multiple social goals.
BTW, decisions on Hobsonville were taken last year, not several years ago, and date from around the same time as the original shared equity announcements (I'm sure you'll find announcements about them by the previous minister of housing), and affordable housing was indeed a big issue at the time.
Wasted opportunities like these should not be condoned, the people missing out due to bad decisions/execution are the ones the policies are aimed at.
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Which is why the other half of the policy is about the government increasing the supply of such homes. if the market won't provide, then the state will ahve to.
I understand the theory behind the proposals. A question remains around the ability to actually put state provision into practice. It would be possible to make the case quite easily that the squandering of opportunities will doom the whole concept.
The Hobsonville project, for example, is for two thousand homes. Why on earth then, will there only be 300 affordable homes, and 300 state homes? Why on earth would it make sense to use one of the largest remaining tracts of state land that can still be freed up (at very little cost to the govt) to build 1400 homes that are not affordable?
Doesn't it strike anyone, even just a little, as a wasted opportunity?
On top of that, there is no longer any government infrastructure which employs builders, surveyors, QS's etc. who could actually carry out construction on anything close to the scale needed. This would make govt provision a more difficult proposition.
Either way, the only winners from these scenarios appear to be the developers and the builders. I'm unsure whether any of these steps will assist people to get into their first home...
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if anyone actually read the speech or the Scoop releases now backing it up, they'd see that the shared equity scheme (a small part of the plan) is only for new builds.
I don't think it is only for new builds. The release by the Minister of Housing implies that it is targeted at high cost areas, rather than to new builds only.
The key problem all of this raises for me, is what effect will increasing the competition for the cheapest (comparatively speaking) houses in a particular area actually have on prices?
Will the people selling cotton on that this increases the level of competition for their house, and thus the potential to hold out for a higher price, or will they consider that they shouldn't seek to capitalise on the extra cash that might float their way?
I hope that normal human nature doesn't kick in, but I suspect it will....