The NZ Housing Market Is broken, Argues Social Housing Researcher

Añadido: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Kay Saville Smith joins us now.

[00:00:02]Kay, welcome to the show. There is a hyphen, is there between Saville and Smith?

[00:00:07]There is. There is, indeed. And is that um you're a Saville and you're married to a Smith or the other way around? No, neither of those things. It's a long and complicated story, Michael, which is great over a glass of wine, but probably is going to be very boring for your audience. Well, I'm fascinated, so I'll have that glass of wine with you just quietly, cuz I'm always interested in hyphenated names. That's all.

[00:00:32]I see a lot of them these days. All right, um Kay, what's your background?

[00:00:37]Why are you on my show talking about social housing? How are you an expert?

[00:00:41]I'm on on your show because you invited me. The reason is, I guess, because I've been on whole involved in housing research since about the 1980s.

[00:00:53]Uh so, I've uh and I've over that run a uh uh independent what's known as an independent research organization, which is specialized in housing and also urban and neighborhood forms. And I for 5 years recently uh served on a part-time basis as the chief science advisor uh for the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development. And the position I left uh was in um on 30th of November. So, I'm very happy to talk um as a housing researcher, as an urban researcher, uh unconstrained by being a public servant. Good on you. That's that's what we like to hear. Listen, um I as I said earlier, I'm in my late 60s and I grew up in a state housing area in Wanganui.

[00:01:44]Um it was they were built especially for people like my my mother and my father.

[00:01:50]Um I was surrounded by working-class folk uh who were in straight Well, not straight in circumstances, but they weren't rich, and that's why they were sitting in a state house.

[00:01:59]The history of state housing in this country is the history of, in actual fact, uh state compassion to a large extent, and um some practical attempt to make that compassion real.

[00:02:10]Are we still in that particular position as a consequence of yesterday's announcements?

[00:02:15]Uh I don't think we've been in that position for about 30 years, actually, Michael. I think I mean, you you you noted before you think it's the right policy, wrong time.

[00:02:24]I would say it's the wrong policy and wrong time, because we've been essentially in the architecture of housing assistance like this since the mid-1990s.

[00:02:33]It's shown itself to have failed, and instead of bravely taking on why it has failed, we keep on doing the same things over and over again. Today the yesterday's announcements are really tr- >> [laughter] >> it really tinkering on the margin. And when you have a assisted what we call demand-side assistance-based uh system, which is primarily the AS, and then it's been supplemented by the income-related rents, um essentially, you've only got two ways of controlling your fiscal impact. Either you reduce the amount that people get, or you reduce the numbers and proportions of people that might get it, and that's what we're doing. And in fact, in this case, what we're trying to do is play off those that are in extreme housing stress with those that are in housing stress, uh and taking from one and giving to to the other. And the twist, of course, about that is the other bit that we have is about what happens to those people in state housing, which has been increasingly targeted in a very particular way over the last or 20 25 30 years. Um Let's go back to I I cuz I I in the caucus um um Murray McCully uh you probably remember this in actual fact.

[00:03:56]>> Yes. Okay.

[00:03:57]>> Yeah.

[00:03:58]was was the then Minister of Housing and I was sitting in the caucus and he was then Minister and he said that the system isn't fair pretty much using the same arguments as yesterday.

[00:04:10]That I can sit in a state house with an income related rent but somebody outside of the state housing fraternity who's private renting has to essentially pay more.

[00:04:22]Uh and in that particular case I think they raised rents, state housing related rents in the state sector but they also introduced the accommodation supplement um as a way of um providing some degree of equity I guess in comparison to those in state houses.

[00:04:42]Do you accept that the allocation of state houses in this country K could stand some improvement?

[00:04:48]Oh, absolutely. But I I would suggest that our housing system is broken. It's not about the state housing is one little element and it is a little element of the housing system. We've got a situation in 19 mid-1990s we introduced a housing system for that was based in terms of government's involvement and based entirely on accommodation supplement.

[00:05:16]It didn't work.

[00:05:18]And so in 19 you know in the in the in the following you know five six years they brought income related rents back for state housing and then they brought the extension of some income related rents to be allowing some community housing providers to get access. Then we added the temporary additional >> before you carry on so just before you can I can I say is there something inherently wrong with income related rents?

[00:05:45]There is something inherently wrong with our housing assistance, whether it's AS, accommodation supplement, temporary additional uh support, and income-related rents. And the architecture is wrong. So, we can keep fiddling around like we've done, and this is an example of it, but there's a fundamental problem in the architecture.