Comment: I work in south Auckland, under the flight path. The planes come low enough that you can count the rivets. My friend pays $400 a week for a two-bedroom unit, more than half her income. Her dad isn’t here to tell me about the land. He is still farming, still shaking his head at the state of things.
But when I think about future generations living well in Aotearoa, I don’t think about that farm. I think about my street. I think about whether the kids playing on the footpath will ever be able to afford a home in the city they were born in. I think about whether the bus will come on time. I think about the fact that I am 19, and the decisions being made right now will determine whether my life here is one of possibility or permanent precarity.
Rod Oram spent his final years asking how 10 billion people could live well on this planet. That is the big question. But the smaller question, the one that keeps me awake, is how the people already here can live well in our cities, in this decade, in the only lives we have.
For my generation, the answer begins and ends with one thing: housing, as the foundation of a life. Without it, nothing else works.
Let’s start with what we measure. In September 2024, the median house price in Auckland was $970,000, which is 36 percent below the 2021 peak but still a figure that defies comprehension for anyone starting out. Nationally, the median house price in February 2026 sat at $795,000.
Here is what that means for someone my age: if I save 20 percent of my after-tax income every week (and in this economy that is a stretch) I will be saving for years. By the time I have a deposit, the goalposts will have moved again.
Renters are not faring better. The national average asking rent eased slightly to $629 per week in February 2026, but in Auckland the burden remains heavy. For young renters, whose incomes sit below the median, housing costs consume a devastating share of their pay. My friend’s rent, at more than half her pay cheque, is not an outlier. It is the arithmetic of exclusion.
The housing crisis is about what a decade of renting does to your ability to put down roots. It is about the constant churn, the six-month leases, the inspections. It is about the quiet exhaustion of knowing that no matter how hard you work, the ladder has been pulled up behind the older generation.
The data tells a story of uneven exposure. South Auckland, where rent is cheaper but not cheap, where incomes are lower and housing stock is older, bears the heaviest weight.
According to the 2024 Quality of Life survey, just one-third of Auckland respondents agreed that their housing costs were affordable. Young people aged 18 to 24 and those living in south and east Auckland were least likely to agree their housing costs were affordable. Māori and Pasifika respondents also reported lower perceptions of their quality of life compared with other ethnic groups.
The same survey found that while three-quarters of Aucklanders rated their quality of life positively, there were wide variations across the city. Urban south Auckland-based respondents were less likely than those in north and rural Auckland to report their quality of life positively.
This is not a housing crisis in the abstract. It is a crisis with a postcode. It lands hardest on the young, the brown, the poor. And it will compound across generations: children who grow up in unstable, unhealthy housing do worse in school, earn less as adults, and are more likely to experience housing insecurity themselves.
The well-identified problem is this: we have treated housing as a financial asset first and a human need second. For decades, tax settings and the favourable treatment of property speculation have funnelled capital into existing housing stock rather than into new supply.
But the deeper problem is political. For years, both major parties have treated housing as an aspiration rather than a secure foundation for a life. They have offered piecemeal fixes while leaving the structural drivers untouched. The result is a generation locked out, watching from the sidelines as the wealth gap widens.
Rod Oram understood that solving complex problems requires confronting the systems that create them. Housing is not a discrete policy area; it is the intersection of economics, environment, social wellbeing, and intergenerational justice. The solution must be equally systemic.
First, we must rebalance the tax settings that have distorted our housing market. New Zealand remains one of the few OECD countries without a comprehensive capital gains tax. The bright-line test, which taxes profits on properties sold within a certain period, is a half-measure that treats symptoms rather than causes. We need a full, inclusive capital gains tax, applied to all assets, with exemptions only for the family home. This would dampen speculative investment, redirect capital into productive sectors, and signal that housing is for living in, not trading.
On interest deductibility, the previous Labour government began phasing it out, but the current National-led government reinstated it. Residential investment property interest is now fully deductible from 1 April 2025. That is exactly the wrong direction. Every dollar of tax subsidy to property speculation is a dollar not spent on new housing, infrastructure, or social services.
Second, we must build social housing at scale. The most direct way to make housing affordable is to provide it. In the 1940s and 1950s, successive governments built tens of thousands of state houses. Numbers fell sharply in the 1990s but rose again in the 2010s. We need a new state house building programme, targeted at the suburbs and regions where need is greatest.
Kāinga Ora has the statutory mandate to build, but under the current government it lacks the political mandate, which has signalled a shift toward community housing providers. We should restore a public building programme, not through public-private partnerships that prioritise investor returns, but through direct public investment that prioritises quality, sustainability, and community.
Third, we must reform the planning system to make it easier to build the right homes in the right places. The Resource Management Act’s replacement is an improvement but does not go far enough. We need mandatory density standards for metropolitan areas, eliminating the patchwork of local council restrictions that have made Auckland’s urban sprawl both environmentally destructive and economically inefficient.
The evidence is clear: denser cities are more affordable, more productive, and emit fewer greenhouse gases.
We also need to fix infrastructure funding. New developments require water, transport, and community facilities, but the current system, reliant on developer contributions and council debt, is too slow and too uncertain. A national infrastructure agency, capitalised by central government, could fund the trunk infrastructure needed to unlock development, with costs recouped over time.
I am 19. I watch my friends leave for Australia, where wages are higher and housing is cheaper. I watch others stay, determined to make this city work, even as it makes them work harder than they should have to.
The wetland I helped fence near Ohakune years ago is now healthy. It was just outside of my friend’s farm. Bitterns have returned. The local school uses it as an outdoor classroom. It produces no export revenue, contributes nothing to GDP, and will never appear in a productivity report. But it represents a form of wealth that my grandchildren will inherit, if we make different choices.
Housing is no different. A stable, warm, affordable home produces no export revenue. It contributes to GDP only in the most indirect way. But it is the foundation on which every other form of wealth depends. Without it, you cannot study, you cannot work reliably, you cannot raise children, you cannot participate in your community. You cannot live well.
The old model is dying. It is not dying because we have killed it, but because it was never alive in the way we pretended. The question is whether we will build something new before it takes us with it.
I have time. But not as much as I thought.
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Sources * Auckland Council. (2024). Auckland economic update November 2024. Knowledge Auckland. * Auckland Council. (2025). Auckland insights from the 2024 Quality of Life survey. * realestate.co.nz. (2026). Over $900 per week: Central Otago Lakes District sets new national rent benchmark. 9 March 2026. * Reserve Bank of New Zealand. (2025). Financial Stability Report May 2025. * RNZ. (2026). Buyers and sellers ‘patient’ as house prices lift, REINZ says. 16 March 2026. |
