Schemes benefit a lucky few

The Greens believe they can sell Government-owned homes worth $300,000 without the buyers having any need for a mortgage.

Each week tenants would pay $200 to meet Crown costs, $100 towards their share of the home and $50 for any extra costs - that's $350 dollars a week to own a home outright in 25 years.

For the tenants who will be getting a brand-new home for less than what a lot of people are paying in rent, it’s a great deal.

But the numbers don’t stack up: It’ll be other taxpayers who finance these low-income families into their homes.

That’s been proved by Labour’s recent backtracking.

The party seems to have come to the realisation that its KiwiBuild numbers don’t make sense. Leader David Shearer had been talking about building 100,000 new homes to be sold for $300,000 each.

So convinced was he about the affordability of the scheme, he said money left over from the sale of each swathe of homes would be reinvested in construction of the next year’s new housing.

Now he says it’s not possible to build a standalone house for that price in Auckland and that $300,000 is the national average. In Auckland, standalone houses will still cost about $550,000.

These policies aren’t sustainable or fair.

No one disagrees that more families owning their own homes is something to aspire to.

But why do we feel compelled to give these families brand-new homes, supported financially by every other New Zealander?

And are we expecting that those families helped into extremely cheap homes would then be altruistic enough to sell them on at less than market price in future? Or might they - quite reasonably - eventually sell their houses for exactly the sort of unaffordable price the politicians are trying to combat?

We need a sustainable solution that makes housing development cheaper for everyone. Not just lovely new houses for a select few.