Housing Crisis Forces Young Couples Out Of Inner City

More evidence has emerged about the difficulties facing people trying to enter the property market for the first time.

An international  housing affordability survey has found that Auckland real estate is severely unaffordable by international standards.

Let's Start Collecting The Bricks

Stuff reports:

Don Brash wants the Bill of Rights changed to give home owners greater rights to do what they want with their property.

In a speech to ACT party faithful in Auckland today at its annual conference, new leader Brash delivered the keynote speech saying the country was in the grip of an emergency so bad New Zealand "faces serious threats to its continued existence".

"As a nation, we are experiencing a long slow emergency. As collapses go, our decline is comfortable and scenic. But we should be under no illusion: if we continue down this track, New Zealand will gradually become a backwater, delivering an ever poorer environment for everybody," he said.

"Our children will grow up cheering for the Wallabies." 

As is often the case with ACT proposals, the solution is often to make the situation much worse.

So we will supposedly stop the flow of people to Australia by becoming a low wage economy and pursuing policies that disadvantage those on lower incomes.

And ACT's solution to the growing number of people in our society for whom the chance of owning a home is already an almost hopeless dream, is to enshrine into law the property rights that advantage those who have accumulated wealth.

Making property rights paramount and removing restrictions on what property owners can do would allow developers to throw up cheap housing without regard for the environment, local values or sensible planning. We would likely see the growth of slums or housing tenements where the poor and disadvantaged would be left to rot, unnoticed by the rest of us lucky enough to have "made it".

If Brash gets his way let's all pool together and buy the land surrounding his house, and build a fifty-metre high brick wall around the boundary of his section. It sounds like he'll be fine with that.