More on housing!
I don’t like to post on weekends, but I had to point to these asap:
- Luke Malpass from NZI writing about non-residenti housing purchase bans (see me being too abrasive here – I will be more careful in the future)
- Seamus Hogan from University of Canterbury and Offsetting Behaviour on Affordable housing – five basic principles.
I don’t think you were being too abrasive, and the foreign housing ban policy isn’t xenophobic, just stupid. It does play to xenophobic sentiment in the electorate though, which sadly still seems to be alive and well, so is a rational move for a scrambling party. Hasn’t helped Winston Peters much though. The policy, like many others, attempts to address a problem by chipping at the fringes (by singling out a particular group to be treated differently) instead of attacking the core issue (which would affect a much larger share of the electorate). I liked your analysis of the policy, and if being abrasive brings more attention to it, so be it. 🙂
I suspect it may be because you know me – so when you see those words you hear them in my non-threatening, schoolboy excited, tones. I thought xenophobic was fairly innocuous – and relatively accurate, people are wanting to do this on an unfounded fear that foreigners are the problem. But turns out people don’t like the sound of the word, so fair enough 😛
It is all interesting stuff – I think one of the other things going on is confusion between types of “capital flows”. Having people come in and buy housing is different than having them lend NZer’s money to buy housing – in terms of where the risk of price adjustments fall. But we shall see!