NEW ZEALAND HOUSING MARKET OUT OF CONTROL, SAYS UNITED NATIONS REPORT

The former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Housing, Leilani Farha, tabled her final report on the New Zealand housing market this week. It is a damning indictment of a market ravaged by rocketing house prices and escalating rents, inadequate living conditions and growing homelessness.

THE UN SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR on Housing, Leilani Farha, was in the country in February last year and said then that she wasn't impressed by what she had seen during her fortnight stay. Farha  commented that the scale of the problem in New Zealand had gone beyond just a housing crisis and had developed into a full blown human rights crisis. She told the media:

'If people in New Zealand continue to call it a housing crisis it obfuscates what is going on here...the conditions are really stark.' Farha observed that there were people sleeping rough in the entrance to her hotel.

So it comes as no surprise that her final report, tabled at the UN Nations Rights Council in Geneva this week, expands on the comments that Farha made last year.   

The report states that the housing crisis could have been avoided if successive governments, both Labour and National, had not allowed housing to become a speculative asset that allowed a small number of people to grow wealthy at the expense of everyone else and to the detriment of society generally;

'Such conditions would not have been reached such a point had housing been fully understood, recognised and implemented  by national and local governments as a human right and a social good rather than an asset for wealth accumulation and growth over the last decades.'

Since Farha was in New Zealand the situation has only continued to deteriorate with government attempts  to 'cool' the housing market completely failing. In May, figures showed that house inflation had increased nearly 30 percent over the previous twelve months.

Unfortunately the mainstream policy consensus continues to revolve around failed market-based solutions. Despite the Labour Government acknowledging that decent and affordable housing is a human right, commentator Bernard Hickey has suggested that the Labour Government is motivated by realpolitik rather than any sense of social responsibility. He says that the Government has concluded that unaffordable housing is politically sustainable because young renters don't matter electorally because some 500,000 18-39 year olds didn't vote at the last election and those who did vote, voted mostly for Labour and the Green's. For Labour, says Hickey, 'the voters to listen to are older home owners in the suburbs and provinces, who are the 'median' votes needed to win re-election'.

Certainly this Labour Government has betrayed its political motivation with the rejection of both a capital gains tax and a wealth tax and its refusal to countenance the kind of large scale public housing program that would help to lower house prices - and rents - generally.

The stark fact remains the same. A crisis of the magnitude that we are now confronted with cannot be solved by, somehow, correcting and regulating the market. All efforts to do that have failed miserably. Far more bolder action is required to solve the housing crisis and that, in the end, means decommodified and democratically controlled housing.  Any solution to the crisis lies beyond the dictates of the market. It means taking the profit motive out of housing. Nothing else will do. But we will have to fight for what we want because the politicians of the five parties sitting in Parliament aren't going to give it to us.

Perhaps we could be motivated by the fact that the exploitation of the housing market for private gain is part and parcel of an economic system where most wealth is gained by the minority at the expense of the majority. The English philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill recognised that way back in 1848:

'The ordinary progress of a society which increases in wealth, is at all times tending to augment the incomes of landlords; to give them both a greater amount and greater proportion of the wealth of the community, independently of any trouble or outlay incurred by themselves. They grow richer, as if it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economising.'