An upmarket, spacious McMansion in Austin, Texas, or a pokey one-bedroom flat in a Soviet-style apartment block in London. The homes may cost the same as a median-priced home on the fringes of Wellington at about NZ$390,000, but what you get for your money is worlds apart. And a report by "think tank" The New Zealand Initiative suggests a lack of supply and difficult planning processes are behind rapidly rising house prices in New Zealand and Britain. Britain was a "housing quagmire" and a telling study of what not to do in housing policy, the NZ Initiative report says. "While the British [housing] market underwent a major correction during the global financial crisis, it is still a stubbornly expensive place to buy small, even pokey houses," it says. Britain suffered from a strong lobby group of Nimbys (not in my back yard) led by the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Its housing market had many of the hallmarks of a Soviet planning system, the report says, with planners deciding where people could live. The Town and Country Planning Act essentially nationalised the right of the British to develop and vested the right in the state. That made it difficult to develop in Britain, especially in new "greenfields" sites which, as in New Zealand, meant a lack of housing supply.
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 09:59:35 +0000
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