PHOTO: SIMON O’CONNOR/STUFF The biggest driver of high house prices over the last 20 years has been soaring land costs.
OPINION: Fixing New Zealand’s housing affordability crisis was one of Labour’s key policy goals going into the last two elections.
But KiwiBuild has been conspicuously absent from the Government’s vocabulary in recent months, and yesterday’s Budget was no different.
The Government might not have given up trying to improve housing affordability, but it seems to have realised that KiwiBuild is not the answer to the problem.
The bulk of the additional $90 million per year allocated to Housing and Urban Development in the Budget will go towards emergency and transitional housing. It’s not sensible to throw good money after bad, so the silence on KiwiBuild is welcome.
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