The main purpose of my trip was to meet with Jazmine Heka, the 16 year old from Whangarei who has started the Children Against Poverty campaign. Jazmine was inspired to take action when she watched Bryan Bruce’s controversial Inside Child Poverty documentary which screened last year in the week before the election (and is available to view on demand for three more days). You might have read about Jazmine and her campaign in the Sunday Star Times a couple of weeks ago.

Photo: Northern Advocate

Jazmine is seeking signatures on three petitions: to introduce warrants of fitness for all rental houses, to provide free healthcare for all children including prescription costs, and to provide free healthy school lunches to all children attending schools. She is hoping to come to Wellington and present the petitions to Parliament in the middle of the year, which leaves plenty of time for collecting signatures: you can download the petitions to print, gather signatures, and mail them back.

It was both exciting and challenging to meet with Jazmine. Exciting to see the issue being taken up by a young person who can speak directly and passionately about it, and who can raise awareness and take the campaign to another level. Challenging because her campaign is confronting all politicians to put their money where their mouths are on the issue of child poverty.

I talked about how the Greens made bringing 100,000 children out of poverty one of our top three priorities during the election campaign, about our Warm Healthy Rentals bill, which would achieve her aim of having a “warrant of fitness” for rental properties, and about our work to establish a cross-party group of MPs working on child poverty and inequality (The Aotearoa Equality Group, which so far has members from the Greens, Labour, and the Maori Party).

I left feeling there is even more we can do. I’m determined that Child Poverty will stay at the top of the political agenda until we get some meaningful action from the Government. As luck, or coincidence, would have it, Social Development Minister Paula Bennett was in Whangarei yesterday too, consulting on her Green Paper for Vulnerable Children. I know she met with Jazmine too, and I hope she takes Jazmine’s challenge seriously.

In the afternoon I took the opportunity  to visit 155 Community Whare. Carol Peters and the team at 155 (named after its address of 155 Kamo Road) know lots about child poverty from their frontline community work. Indeed, researchers for the Inside Child Poverty documentary that inspired Jazmine to take action did much of their research in the area, and spoke to 155 and its affiliated services in preparing the documentary.

Over a cup of tea at the kitchen table (the 155 kaupapa is to build a better world over a cup of tea, a philosophy with which I wholeheartedly concur) I spoke with members of 155′s legal advocacy, whanau support,  youth, and housing teams and was blown away at what they are able to achieve with scarce resources.

Since it was established in the 1990s, 155 whare has established a patient-owned health service, a school for young people at risk of disengagement, an emergency housing service, a community law centre, and even a television channel! Many of these are now fully independent entities but remain affiliated with 155. It’s a truly inspiring place, founded on principles of community ownership, and achieving great results.

155 and other community services are up against it though, with the scale of poverty and disengagement in the North. We talked about increasing demand for food services (both for food parcels and for food in schools), long waiting lists for budgeting services, the harmful effects on children of increasing sanctions against beneficiaries as a result of the Future Focus changes last year, the adult stresses children are exposed to when their parents experience financial hardship, the growing pressures on emergency housing services in Whangarei, and the ever-present dynamic of gangs and the black market economy.

I left Whangarei feeling overwhelmed with the scale of the issues, but buzzing from the connection with people doing great work, and inspired about the task ahead of me as the new Green Party Spokesperson for Children, Housing and Youth. These issues are why I got into politics – now I get to tackle them head on.

If you’re a landlord.

If you’re a potential tenant, it’s crap news. It probably means endless rejected applications, missing out on the rare gems that are suitable and reasonably priced in a matter of minutes, and ending up signing a lease for an overpriced or unsuitable home just because you’re scared you won’t find something else. It means landlords can charge what they like because they know they’ll find someone willing to pay more than you. If you have children, pets, or other special circumstances, you probably won’t even get a look in because it’s just easier for the landlord (or property manager) to let to someone less complicated.

So yes, good news is definitely in the eye of the beholder. TradeMe’s stats also add weight to evidence of an emerging housing shortage, which is also bad news for all of us. As Metiria pointed out to interest.co.nz last year, a lack of supply drives rents up, and the Government foots part of the bill via the Accommodation Supplement (AS).

The AS is a government payment to people deemed unable to fully meet their housing costs (board, rent, or mortgage) and it cost the Government $1.2 billion in the year to June 2011. The Government’s official projections don’t predict a major increase in spending on the AS in the next five years, but the Housing Shareholders Association and the Salvation Army say a combination of lack of supply, increasing rents, and an increase in the number of people claiming the AS as the recession bites mean the real cost could be much higher, perhaps as much as $2.2 billion per annum by 2016.

So not only will more people struggle to make ends meet paying higher rents (one quarter of all New Zealand households now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs), with the resulting poor consequences for children and families, but the cost to the Government is significant. And instead of improving outcomes for those to whom the AS is targeted, the main beneficiaries are landlords and property investors, to whom it is effectively a subsidy. There’s something very wrong with this picture.

Without messing with the AS (which hundreds of thousands of people now rely on), wouldn’t it be wise for the Government to invest in the easing the supply side of the housing market, by increasing the provision of affordable state and social housing?

The Green Party has proposed building 2,000 new state and community houses before the rebuild of Christchurch gets underway, to create employment, help to ease housing demand, and keep skilled builders in New Zealand where they’re desperately needed.

What do you think?

We’re not alone, and tonight we’re joined by two former Mayors, four members of Parliament, one Auckland councillor, one New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year, four Sir Peter Blake Trust Emerging Leaders plus an incredible array of leaders from the community and business sectors.

One-off events like these help raise awareness but the critical thing that needed is Government leadership to seriously inquire into homelessness issues and then develop an across-government homeless strategy backed up with resources. Every Kiwi deserves a warm, healthy home.

Help us raise some cash for the great work Lifewise does: Metiria’s page, and Gareth’s page.

While housing affordability is a serious issue for all NZers, it’s particularly bad in Auckland. Recently I asked the Parliamentary library to do some research which showed the average house price in Auckland is generally at least $100,000 higher than the national average.

This is largely because Auckland is growing so quickly  - and it’s going to get worse! Another 600,000 people are predicted to move into Auckland over the next 20 years.

Unfortunately, it seems the government has brought into the myth that the best way to increase housing affordability in Auckland is to encourage greenfields development on the fringes of our cities.

This is at best only a short-term solution to housing affordability. Houses on the urban fringe may cost less for first time buyers but over time they’ll cost us all more. Why? Well, the cost to local and central government of providing new infrastructure and services (e.g., waste disposal, water, electricity, roads, public transport) to spread out developments on the peripheries of cities is high.

The Auckland Regional Council commissioned a report into this recently. It looked at various scenarios for Auckland’s growth.

It found that if Auckland was allowed to grow outwards rapidly at a low density it would cost $10 billion more to provide just transport infrastructure (let alone water, energy etc), than if it grew in a more compact fashion.

That’s a lot of extra rates for people to pay!

Also, the cost of transport for people who buy houses on the periphery of our cities is significant.  For example, to commute by train from Ranui to the CBD would cost $170/month. Of course, any family living in spread out Ranui would likely need a car as well with all the related running costs.

Right now, it might still be cheaper to buy a house in Ranui and commute than live in the CBD. But given the various reports coming out about the likelihood of increases in oil prices (and petrol has cracked the $2.00 / litre mark again) , it seems very likely that the cost of transport (particularly private vehicles) will rise dramatically in the near future.

Finally, the more people live on the outskirts of our cities in areas with poor public transport the more likely they are to commute by car. Added congestion on motorways heading into the cities costs us all in terms of lower air quality, wasted time, and stress.

And, of course, when they get into town they need to park their cars somewhere - taking more space in the centre of our cities that could otherwise be used more profitably for housing or commerce.

So is sprawl really a long term solution to housing affordability in Auckland? I doubt it. I’ll blog more about Green solutions to this problem next week.

I slept on cardboard in a car park and used my jacket as a pillow. Having a young child I know what sleepless nights are all about but last night it was the soreness and pins and needles of lying on such a hard surface that kept me awake. I only got about 4 hours sleep but luckily for me it wasn’t cold or wet.

For many in New Zealand however, every night is like this – except many suffer from violence, mental illness and drug abuse too. Homelessness is a huge and often under-estimated problem in New Zealand affecting our most marginalised and vulnerable people. The recent Government taskforce Home and Housed report found that there is a shortage of 70,000 houses in New Zealand, and that 8,500- to 20,000 New Zealand households have extreme housing issues. The solution of course must be holistic and multi-faceted but one area where the Government can make a direct impact is state housing, but John Key’s Government slashed the budget for building and upgrading state houses from $120 million to $18 million in the latest Budget.

Thanks to Lifewise for organising this amazing opportunity for me to talk to some amazing and passionate advocates of their journey through homelessness, visit the night shelter and soup kitchen and for all the great, often thankless, work they do. I think it is only fair that everyone has access to warm, healthy housing in New Zealand.

That’s the type of country I want to live in but do you think that vision is shared by the Government?

P.S – Sorry if I was snoring last night.

I’m in Dunedin tomorrow, thermometer in hand checking out, and staying the night in some of the cold damp rentals there. Over the coming weeks I’m touring the country talking to people about my Private Members’ Bill to see a minimum standard for rental properties to achieve warm, healthy rentals. I’m also going to try and find some of the worst examples of cold, damp unhealthy rentals. Do you, or someone you know, live in a horrible rental? I’d love to hear your stories and see your pictures and you can share them on Facebook.

Like many, I’ve rented some pretty dire houses over the years. I cursed the designer of my last flat in Mt Albert, Auckland because he or she provided a massive bathroom that got great all day sun, but the bedroom, kitchen and lounge (ok, every other room) was in almost perpetual darkness. Living in Holloway Rd, down a cold Wellington valley, was probably my dampest, most unhealthy flat. In this house you’d see your breath no matter what time of day, it literally got only one hour of sun between 2-3pm, and clothes left on the floor overnight were wet come morning. The grossest manifestation of my range of cold, damp flats were the mushrooms growing in the shower of one house I rented.

By first world standards, the state of our 450,000 rental houses is appalling which has massive impacts downstream on tenants health, energy bills and on the economy. I believe everyone deserves a healthy home that is affordable to heat. We deserve to live in dignity – inside warm, healthy homes.

It’s a big deal – along with food and water, shelter is one of the essentials of life.

The last big review in 2004 cleaned up many of the disastrous provisions from the original 1991 Act that gave us leaky buildings. Fixing that mess has been estimated at $22 billion!

It’s vital this National Government doesn’t take us back to the situation we had when they were last in power in the name of ‘clearing red tape’ and reducing the ‘cost of regulation.’

The way buildings are built and designed can have a big impact on the environment, particularly around energy and water use and how building materials are sourced and used.

The homes people live in also affect their quality of life, for example we know that if houses aren’t insulated properly it can lead to poor health sometimes with tragic outcomes like this Southland Times story.

The Government’s focus in this review is on reducing costs but I would encourage you to remind them that looking after the environment and people’s quality of life also need to be a priorities.

If you are interested in the Greens approach to housing issues – check out our policy.

If you want to make a submission, the deadline is 23 April. Go on get involved!

the number of mortgagee sales – where a borrower’s property is sold by the [bank] – reached the highest levels since records began

They’ve only been keeping records since 1994 though

At the end of the article there are some numbers, which I made a graph of

Manukau (orange line) is pretty extraordinary – in 2007 there were less forced sales than Waitakere.

The graph is a bit misleading – in percentage terms, Auckland City had less of an increase than most. Manukau is still clearly the stand-out, with a 1242% increase.

Does anyone have figures for earlier than 2007?

Otago Polytech and the University were working together to develop a design institute that they would share. They were promised a $12.5 million suspensory loan from the government but that is apparently now under review.

The Tertiary Education Commission announced last month the process for allocating capital funding for tertiary education institutions was on hold while the new Government’s tertiary education priorities were determined. Until then, all Capital Fund applications were on hold.

The Tertiary Education Union reported on it last week as well, saying that apparently assessments by Dunedin City Council estimate that every million dollars invested into the OID generates five million dollars worth of economic activity for the region.

So this is where the Council needs to step in and assure the Dunedin people that these kinds of community focused, economically viable projects will take priority over funneling money into a stadium that provides no guarantee of return, let alone staying within budget. We dont need massive projects like the stadium in Dunedin, we need investment in retrofitting the dismal housing, investing in public transport, protecting our marine resources and coast from sewage and providing certainty for smaller scale projects that the council knows will make a return for city. The Think Big ideology is a failure. Investing in the local community infrastructure is the only rational response to the recesession.

Does he see any opportunity to simultaneously deal with the job losses in the housing construction sector and assist the nearly 10 thousand people on the Housing New Zealand waiting list?

The Minister manages to insult the former Minister, requiring an apology and withdrawal, then goes on to insult Sue Bradford, again being silenced by the Speaker. It was a pretty poor showing. The government’s paltry promise of another 69 state houses over the existing plan doesn’t contribute one iota to the need for new state housing or the protection of  the failing building industry.

According to the Standard blog only 8% of us are actually property investors – which means that a small percentage of croakers will be mighty happy right now. As for those frogs paying off student loans, bringing up tadpoles and without a spare couple of hundred thousand to participate in the housing market – well we will end up paying those great letting fees.

I wonder how many Government MPs are renting – besides the swanky Wellington residence close to the Hive? – I’m guessing not too many. Instead this rewrite will be written by those who don’t know what it’s like to get a letter around Xmas telling you the land-person are moving back in and you’ve got six weeks to find somewhere else for the family. And say your rental property has dodgy drains – well you won’t be able to go to a tribunal with a professional support person.

This is a difficult enough task at the best of times. Imagine what this will mean for those people who have just lost their jobs and there struggling with English or people.

As Green MP Sue Bradford points out ‘this issue affects many New Zealanders there were 24,297 tenancy tribunal hearings held in the 2006/2007 years.’ C’mon Phil ‘Let’s keep it fair not return to Dicken’s days of yesteryear.’

Since when did our collective response to homelessness and the associated housing poverty that accompanies it become to complain that it is an eyesore.  Radio New Zealand reports Goldsmith saying it is unacceptable for vagrants to be seen on the city’s streets. The important word is apparently ‘seen’. If you listen to the interview his concern seems to be partly that they were still ‘in bed’ lounging about at 9:15am, presumably rather than up and about doing aerobics or dusting or similar.

I note he has not specified which suburb he will be moving this central city problem on to. (My guess is Parnell). Someone else’s problem.

• raising the rate of building and acquiring state houses through Housing New Zealand Corporation to at least 3000 houses a year for the next three years;
• a “massive” increase if funding for community and iwi based housing so a minimum 1000 houses a year could be built over the next three years;
• removing legislative, regulatory and financial barriers to make it easier for Maori to build on communally owned land;
• introducing a capital gains tax on all but the family home and tightening the rules around Loss Attributing Qualifying Companies and equivalent methods of achieving tax deductions.

Sue said of the policy:

The foundation of the Greens’ national housing strategy is that no one remains homeless or in inadequate or substandard housing.

Housing has been a problem that government has never really got on top for at least the last two decades.  It is going to take significant reinvestment to rebuild stock so that owning a family home is something that ordinary New Zealanders can work toward.  That will mean providing more housing for those most in need as well as changing the balance so that people who want to buy homes to live in are not losing out to property investors and speculators.

Professor Philippa-Howden Chapman says of the establishment of a $1 billion fund to insulate every house in NZ as part of the Government’s climate change policy: “This is an extraordinary example of a creative shift in thinking that truly places New Zealand in the twenty-first century.”

“Insulating all houses and reducing fuel poverty by compensating residential electricity users for raised prices should lead to evident health benefits for all New Zealanders.”

He Kainga Oranga has some interesting research on the health impacts of crowding, insulation and heating of New Zealand houses.   Its work suggests that there are 1600 excess deaths in winter when the temperature drops, compared to summer.

This is a similar move to the Dutch, who used the proceeds of North Sea Gas finds to centrally heat all homes in the Netherlands in the mid-1970s and were able to track an associated improvement in life expectancy.

“The present poor energy efficiency of our houses in New Zealand has had serious public health consequences,” Professor Howden-Chapman says. “Many of our homes were built in the late 19th century and the early part of the 20th, when energy seemed so cheap we just used lots of it. With the certainty of climate change, we don’t have the luxury of doing that any more.”

And here’s a view you may not have heard in among all the strategic political noise about game playing:

“This political deal is an example of rational policy making at its best.  It puts in place a policy which deals with bad environmental consequences of energy inefficient houses by insulating them, which has been repeatedly shown to be the most cost-effective policy for reducing climate change.”

Housing spokesman Phil Heatley told a Housing Institute seminar in Waitakere yesterday that National would give back to Housing New Zealand tenants the right to buy their houses.

They had this right until the Labour Party won the 1999 election.

But he said National would not sell state houses to outside investors, as it did in the 1990s, and would use the proceeds of sales to tenants to buy or lease new state houses.

“If they purchase their state home, we will replace that home within the housing stock so as to lift someone else off the waiting list,” he said.

 National has also said it will retain the policy of fixing rents at 25% of tenants’ income.

The two key parts of the policy for me that make it acceptable are:

• it should only be the people living in the home that have the right to buy it, not outside investors and speculators.
• and the proceeds from the sale of the house should be used to buy to build more state houses to replenish the existing stock. Increasing the housing sock in this way may even help lower rents over time.

It would also allow the government to eventually spread state houses more evenly throughout our towns and suburbs rather than creating clusters of state house suburbs separated from the rest of the community and possibly ghettoised. It’s important though that we also significantly increase our state housing stock to help people who currently are struggling from unaffordable accommodation.

In the end the proposal has the potential to be a good system for for getting people into their own homes.

Unfortunately, new figures this week reveal that house prices have already fallen by more over the past 12 months than in any year during the Great Depression. The S&P/Case-Shiller national index fell by 14.1% in the year to the first quarter. This shows that the latest fall in nominal prices is already much bigger than the 10.5% drop in 1932, at the worst point of the Depression.

Today inflation is running at a brisk pace, so property prices have fallen by a staggering 18% in real terms over the past year. In nominal terms, the average home is now worth 16% less than at the peak in 2006, and the large overhang of unsold houses suggests that prices have further to fall. If so, this housing bust could well see a bigger cumulative fall in prices than the 26% real drop over the five years to 1933. Most people would call that a pretty destabilising contraction.

I hope it’s not infectious! Hat tip: bjchip