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Human right to housing obscured by debate

Senior lecturer in law at Victoria University. Former parliamentary staffer for Labour MP Parekura Horomia.

One of the worst aspects of the bureaucratic back and forth over the formerly crossparty Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS), the set of rules helping enable housing density in urban authorities, is that it obscures the meaning of the right to housing. That is, the right to a warm, dry and safe home is a right to life.

The tragedy at Loafers Lodge is a wretched reminder that the difference between warm, dry and safe housing and cold, wet and unsafe housing is literally life and death. That’s a scandal, and yet the difference attracts the barest scrutiny.

In 2018 a staggering 34% of New Zealanders reported their homes were sometimes or always damp, while 36% reported their homes were mouldy. That state of affairs, almost 2 million New Zealanders living in unacceptable conditions, seems like a permanent part of the political consensus.

The MDRS was a modest attempt to break that consensus. Under the cross-party agreement developers can build up to three houses of up to three storeys – including terraced housing and lowrise apartments – without the need to enter a lengthy resource consent process.

The rules were included in the statute book in 2021. Yet, not even two years later, National is promising to withdraw from the cross-party agreement and legislate to enable ‘‘green field’’ development instead. In plain English that means building out, not up (as per the MDRS), and devouring more agricultural and recreational land at the urban fringes. This is the model of urban development that prevailed for most of the last century.

Which is to say it’s a failed model. Suburban sprawl, as normal as it seems to the generations conditioned to expect it, is ludicrously inefficient. Pāpāmoa’s perpetual expansion east means the Government and the council are constructing a costly new interchange on the four-lane Tauranga Eastern Link.

As urban centres fold out across their coastal or inland plains, newer, flasher roads are required to transport people to the places where they actually work. Auckland’s perpetual expansion south also means underground works are required to connect the city’s new, distant centres to Three Waters infrastructure, electricity, fibre and more.

But building up avoids a lot of this inefficiency: terraced housing in Mt Eden hardly requires a new motorway to transport people into the CBD; apartments in Mt Maunganui wouldn’t necessarily require new Three Waters infrastructure.

Yet in some ways this analysis is besides the point. For homeowners the chief benefit – or at least the perceived benefit – of slow sprawl is it locks in the value of their home. Journalist Bernard Hickey jokes the economy is a housing market with bits tacked on. The cutting part of that joke is, well, it’s not a joke. In the four years from 2017 to 2021 the housing market made $535 billion in tax-free capital gains.

In a properly functioning market innovations in, say, construction techniques might underpin part of those capital gains. But in New Zealand’s broken market a decades-long housing shortage underpins the gains with too many people chasing too few houses.

That inflationary dynamic unfolds in people’s lives in different forms: the social housing wait list hitting 24,000 in April 2021; the $365 million spent annually on emergency housing in motels, hotels and other short-term accommodation providers as of that year; the almost never-ending rent increases in most cities.

This housing shortage not only locks in homeowners’ value, but it also offers few incentives or reasons, beyond the goodwill of the owner, to improve the housing stock. This is partly why more than a third of New Zealanders live in substandard housing – because the value is locked in regardless of the actual living condition.

The MDRS would go some way to correcting that broken market, enabling more homes, closer to existing infrastructure, and built to better standards.

In this debate it’s easy to retreat into the bureaucratic aspects – the speed at which dense developments can happen versus green-field developments; the respective building techniques or the desirability of particular clauses in the Resource Management Act. But the heart of the matter is the conditions in which people live. The MDRS would go some way to improving those conditions, granting people richer opportunities to thrive.

In 2008 the radical theorist David Harvey made a seminal argument for ‘‘the right to the city’’. He wrote that ‘‘the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is . . . one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights’’.

The right to housing, then, and its corollary in the right to life, are human rights. The people seeking social housing, emergency housing or even long-term accommodation in death traps like Loafers Lodge do not enjoy the full measure of their human rights. This is what’s at stake in our broken housing market and National’s withdrawal from the MDRS only makes matters worse.

This housing shortage offers few incentives or reasons, beyond the goodwill of the owner, to improve the housing stock.

Opinion

en-nz

2023-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281895892624875

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