Barefaced theft by the Key government. Again.

18 Responses to Barefaced theft by the Key government. Again.

1. Cadwallader says:

   March 26, 2015 at 10:53

   Is the stock of state-housing still an asset? The advice I have read is that significant portions of the stock is worth only land value. What does it matter if this garbage is hawked off? State housing has often been occupied by the grossly self-entitled who have shown their “appreciation” by trashing it. Perhaps the time has arrived when the state steps (or runs) out of the housing market?
   • Cadwallader says:

     March 26, 2015 at 10:56

     Further: the reporter is wrong insofar as The Salvation Army has not “rejected” the concept of operating state housing, the Army has noted that it currently does not have the capacity or the resources to engage in it. The expectation is that given further lead-in time they’ll be in a position to participate. I am meeting with a fine person later today who is an officer and a benefactor in the Army. The topic is housing.
     • Ronbo says:

       March 26, 2015 at 11:56

       Sally does the best job with getting the DESERVING poor back on their feet – whereas, the UNDERSEVING homeless gets the bum’s rush to the door
   • KG says:

     March 26, 2015 at 14:44

     A predictable response, Cad.
     But the facts remain that the houses are owned by the taxpayer, there is a serious shortage of affordable rental housing and the character of some of the occupants has nothing to do with this.
     “significant portions of the stock is worth only land value” is a statement I’d take with a pinch of salt. What that means is that land is now so insanely expensive that perfectly habitable old houses sitting on it form a very small fraction of the value.
     That doesn’t make the house worthless.
     The price of houses has been driven to absurd heights by government policies and the truth of the matter is that they regard affordable, State-owned rentals as a nuisance and an impediment to their developer mates.
     It’s just too damn easy to write off a taxpayer-owned pool of housing as “housing for losers” when in fact mostly it’s no such thing. Fucking speculators using housing as nothing more than a means to increase their personal wealth have done more to make housing unaffordable than any other single factor.
     This “garbage” as you refer to it performs an essential social function and yes, it does matter if it’s “hawked off”. There are social costs and expensive downstream consequences to unaffordable housing.
     • Cadwallader says:

       March 26, 2015 at 15:04

       Have a look around towns like Woodville, Murupara etc… the valuation issues arise from the fact that state housing was generally built in clusters hence one poorly maintained/neglected property hauls down the value of the neighbourhood. If the likes of the Salvation Army enters this end of the market I would trust their levels of concern to cater for the housing stock. I do not disagree that state housing addresses a real need but successive governments and bureacracies have let “us” the owners down by a failure to maintain.
     • Wombat says:

       March 26, 2015 at 20:07

       The shortage of affordable properties is due to government meddling, particularly in the matter of land availability and the creation of fractional reserve banking.

       It is a problem that will never be solved because it’s been created deliberately in order to keep the common man running the hamster wheel of 9-5 $xoo,ooo interest repayment for 25-30 years, too exhausted to lynch his masters in parliament, too terrified to lose everything he’s sweated and sacrificed for when he drops a payment and the bank sells his home at firesale prices and still comes after his other assets for the “loss” they’ve incurred, waiting for the day he retires, only to have his home seized to pay for his incarceration in a nursing home and be treated like an animal for the rest of his natural days.

       So, no. The government is not interested in solving a problem that benefits them and their crony-capitalist buddies in so many, many ways. And no, there is no way to “unscramble” that egg. It all has to be burned down, and it should be no other way, because if it were any easier then we’d only end up in the same position a generation later.
     • G P says:

       March 28, 2015 at 02:33

       KG

       Couldn’t agree more. Public housing is essential as not everyone can afford market rents especially if they’re on minimum wage.

       My brother knows this rort all too well as he works in the building industry. In the area where he lives there was $2 million dollars spent on doing up state units and the refurbishment was done really well. Well, within three years they were all sold off and through back room deals developers bought them and demolished them meaning a greater strain on public housing stock. They will make a killing on overpriced new housing all at our expense.
2. Wombat says:

   March 26, 2015 at 19:47

   The unfortunate truth is that welfare is like a black hole and more people get sucked into it than escape it.

   People need help.
   Government needs more money to help them.
   Government taxes people more.
   Businesses treading water go under.
   Jobs are lost.
   More people need help.
   Government needs more money to help them.

   I’m sympathetic to the issue, but welfare housing should be bare bones bordering-on-Japanese-metropolis-shoebox style arrangements aimed at putting a roof over the head in need and giving them the maximum possible motivation to get the hell out there and do better for themselves.

   What we have now is an endless bitchfest about how little Johnny has fallen below the poverty line because his ADSL1 line puts him at a disadvantage against the rich kids when he’s playing Call of Duty on his $600 dollar Playstation.

   No offense, but screw that nonsense for a joke. I grew up “poor” in a better home than I could ever afford to put my kids in now that I’m an adult in the workforce.
   • KG says:

     March 26, 2015 at 19:58

     I agree there are too many such cases, Wombat. But that neither justifies theft of taxpayer’s property nor lumping everybody into the “no-hoper” basket.
     • Wombat says:

       March 26, 2015 at 20:11

       Theft? I agree. Auction the lot of them with a clause stating that if they must be rented at a cap of “x% of the median welfare rate per room”.

       What price they bring goes to treasury.

       Keeping the government in the loop is always a mistake, every time.
       • Wombat says:

         March 26, 2015 at 21:09

         As for the “no-hoper basket”, people are not confined to a basket by virtue of us putting them there.

         No man that has crawled out of poverty has credited the welfare system with his success, myself included.

         No, in my case and millions of others throughout the western world, welfare prolonged my poverty by nurturing the idea that other people owed me a living, and that my destiny was ruled by how much they could be forced to cough up.

         And I lost a lot of years in that trap.
     • Cadwallader says:

       March 26, 2015 at 20:45

       Tolerated destruction of taxpayer property is surely as wrong as outright theft or selling on a friendly basis to alleged cronies?
       • Wombat says:

         March 26, 2015 at 22:06

         My take on the matter is pretty much the same as every other welfare matter, and Penn Jilette sums it up rather nicely.

         “It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.

         People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we’re compassionate we’ll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.

         This is the arrogant heart of the welfare state. It as much as states “you are a bastard who will never help the less fortunate, so we must therefore take your money against your will and redistribute it, because we are noble and you are an asshole.”
         • Cadwallader says:

           March 28, 2015 at 07:33

           The attitude which really grates with me is that which insists; the only tenable altruism is that doled out by the state with tax-funded largesse. This is a repeatedly demonstrable untruth! There are many sticky fingers in the factories of the bureaucrats which just happen to siphon off the cream stolen from the workers.
3. The Gantt Guy says:

   March 28, 2015 at 07:51

   In one very important sense, I’m with you here KG. Government intrusion in the housing market – the artificial constriction of land supply and the deliberate destruction of the currency being only the two most obvious and egregious acts – has caused the price of home-ownership to climb so high as to be out of the reach of many (most?) people.

   I also agree there’s a need, primarily because of the flow-on effects of house prices to the rental market, wherein some small percentage of people will need housing assistance. My preference – as with education – would be a voucher system, but given the nation has gone down the path of providing houses rather than providing housing assistance, that horse has bolted.

   I disagree, however, that the taxpayer needs to own these houses. I believe social service providers such as the Sallys can do a far better job of this than the government, if given the opportunity and the time to get the required infrastructure in place. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for the government to negotiate some kind of an agreement whereby they sell (or give) stock to the social service provider, in exchange for a contractual obligation from the provider that they will – in perpetuity – provide a minimum of “x” houses of a certain standard. I believe the stock would be managed far better – the stock would become an asset on the provider’s balance sheet and they would therefore become incentivised to ensure it is maintained to a certain standard. The situation that exists today where a family moves into a house and stays there for decades would no longer exist, because the provider would be constantly under pressure to house those at the “bottom” of their tree and move those at the “top” out into the private market.

   It would also naturally resolve the situation where social housing sits at addresses which are amongst the most expensive in the country (AFAIR, there is “state housing” sitting – empty, last I heard – on Paratai Drive in Orakei, Auckland. You can’t buy property on this street for less than a couple million dollars, and yet there’s social housing stock sitting there! The government can’t/won’t sell it, whereas a social housing provider could offload it and buy perhaps 4 or 5 properties in more modest neighbourhoods.

   A friend of mine is an engineer who specialises in designing “smart” neighbourhoods. He was, until recently, working for Housing New Zealand. He tried to get them to think laterally, to innovate and modernise, but said it almost drove him out of his head. They’re stuck in the 1950s with the way they work, and refused to even consider any of his innovative ideas to modernise and improve the stock (including the rotation idea I mentioned above).
   • KG says:

     March 28, 2015 at 08:13

     I think you and I share very similar views on this, Gantt.
     But what sticks in my craw is the way the Government has gone about offloading the houses – it stinks and we both know that if Iwi get control of large numbers of them they’ll be allocated on the usual maori basis of racism, nepotism and corruption.
     I also detest the tendency to regard all welfare as “bad” and all welfare recipients as bludgers. There are enough simplistic extremists opposing us, without us falling into the same trap.
     • The Gantt Guy says:

       March 28, 2015 at 08:25

       Yep, I think we are on the same page.

       Not all welfare is bad, but – as with every government programme – the delivery is almost unbelievably inefficient, and the outcomes perverse to the point those who need a hand-up are ignored at the expense of those who expect a hand-out.

       The issue I have is that successive governments, culminating in the raw and rampant corruption evidenced in the Key administration, have so egregiously enriched their cronies at the expense of the rest of us, that I trust precisely nothing any pronouncement from elected or appointed official. Given its record, it goes without saying the Key government will give housing stock to their mates in the corporate IWI, meaning it will be houses for me, but none for thee.

       It’s at the point where if the government is involved (and the government is involved in every single aspect of every single NZ resident’s life), I automatically and reflexively know I’m being raped. Not even wined, dined, kissed then fucked. Violently raped.
       • KG says:

         March 28, 2015 at 11:53

         Amen.