Damp housing, not enough houses
Coming late to the party but here goes.
Part of the issue of housing is what our vision of what a house is. If you ask most people in New Zealand to describe a house, it's a standalone building with internal space of 200 sq metres on a piece of land - usually built as a one-off.
The majority of people who here live in urban areas - we have one of the more urbanised populations other than a couple of city states.
For most of our history, that's been relatively sustainable but has created urban sprawl and vast tracts of suburbia in Auckland and other larger urban centres. For the most part, a good proportion of greater Auckland is no more dense in housing units than say Tauranga, Dunedin or New Plymouth.
Auckland has either reached or is reaching the limits of that urban form given the economy that we have. The population of Auckland urban area is getting to a million people and its forecasted to pick up more of the growth in the population in the next 30 years. That's because there is strong internal
migration to Auckland, a lot of migrants settle in Auckland and a lot of returning kiwis who spent time living in larger cities overseas on their OE settle back in Auckland rather than return to the provinces. Also emigration overseas from Auckland had slowed markedly over the past few years particularly heading to Australia.
Now remember I mentioned density of housing units is similar to a lot of other places, the average house in Auckland has a higher number of occupants - nearly 1 more person than most in rest of NZ.
Opening up more tracts of land for housing is one idea. Changing the urban form with medium to high density housing units is another. But that's a major paradigm shift for most kiwis who don't envisage medium density terrace houses and apartments as homes and certainly not without a piece of land. And everywhere else in the country, that model of housing is completely foreign.
So if we are going to house 1.3 million people in Auckland then we will have to change that vision for housing because it isn't sustainable - at least for a lot of people. And a lot of the current housing stock will have to change if individuals and families want to live in Auckland and be able to move freely and have a quality of life that they desire.
The question is then if we want a family bringing in $50k a year and want to have the cost of housing at say a multiplier of 5 - it isn't realistic for a 200 sq metre standalone house to be $250k in Auckland or for a lot of urban areas. So then you go back to what that home might look like - might have to be smaller and not standalone - might be a terrace or an apartment. You can build warm, dry small form housing that might look similar if not identical in form and fit out to its neighbours.
But tenants and homeowners will have to accept that that form is what an Auckland home will be for a good part of the population.