On Friday morning I picked up my copy of The Post to find on the front page a story clearly handed to Stuff’s political editor Luke Malpass, about a shiny new intervention that ministers were to announce later that morning to help out residential property developers. It was, we were told, going to offer free downside price/liquidity insurance to large and established property developers. It would be sold as strictly “time-limited” except that there would, in fact, be no time limit specified.

My reaction on Twittter was “What…….” and it brought to mind that old jeer about business-friendly (as opposed to pro-market) governments and an enthusiasm among some of their supporters to “capitalise the gains and socialise the losses”. Little did we imagine that this would in fact become declared and intended policy of this National/ACT/NZ First government (not in the midst of a crisis, where sometimes these things happen, but as a whole new policy tool). I’m not generally an ACT fan, but……you have to wonder what the point of an allegedly pro-market anti-intervention libertarian party is if they wave things like this scheme through Cabinet (and not even their backbenchers have issued statements of disapproval, they being rather freer than ministers).

Malpass’s report was quickly proved accurate, with the announcement later that morning by Chris Bishop and Chris Penk (ministers of housing and of building and construction respectively) of the Residential Development Underwrite scheme.

The fact that it appeared to replace but considerably extend schemes in place under Labour was not a point in its favour

Funding for the RDU will be redirected from unused funding from the Kiwibuild and BuildReady Development Pathway programmes. Both of these programmes are now closed to new applications.

This government (rightly) having made much of inheriting a large structural fiscal deficit, and wanting to get government out of business, instead jump in boots and all. And all apparently on the basis that a couple of Cabinet ministers and their MHUD officials know better than the market what should be built when, where, and by whom, and thus who will win the benevolence of the free government underwrite.

There was more information on the MHUD website, but it was no more reassuring. There was no sign of any analytical framework behind any of it (no analysis at all, let alone anything serious or rigorous. of market failures or any sort of cost-benefit analysis or risk assessment). In fact, there was a distinct sense of something that had been rushed out. Some property developers had presumably been bending the ears of ministers. As the Herald put it “the government is riding to the rescue of stressed property developers”, in a distinctly picking-winners approach to the recession. Plenty of people and firms will have undergone huge stress in the last couple of years, as inflation was squeezed back out of the system. It was and is a necessary adjustment. But most apparently didn’t enjoy the favour of ministers.

And will no doubt do so again. In one article on Friday, Bishop was quoted thus

Bishop said the scheme wouldn’t be in place forever and Cabinet would make decisions about when to “turn it on and off” depending on demand and construction activity.

So that would no predictable and rigorous framework, but rather a great deal of trust in ministers’ ability to forecast construction cycles and housing demand, or to respond to pressures of the electoral cycle or developers bending their ears. Good regulation – like a good tax system – is stable and predictable, not turned on or off at the whim of ministers. This is poor policy, done poorly. And isn’t it simply dishonest for a government department to repeat ministerial spin about the intervention being “time-limited” (and MHUD does exactly that upfront) when there is no time limit at all? After all, in the grand scheme of things every policy intervention will eventually be altered/amended.

In essence what the scheme involves:

• the government will guarantee to purchase at an agreed (in advance) price houses that don’t sell at an (approved) market price within an approved period of time,
• only large-scale developers will be eligible for this assistance, preferably those building in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton, and Tauranga [a little surprised Queenstown wasn’t on the favoured list),
• no fee will be charged for this put option that is being granted to the developers

The rationale appears to be that banks and other potential lenders aren’t sufficiently willing to take risks on this projects, even at high fees/interest margins, but……government knows better/best. Quite why we are supposed to believe this self-delusion (ministers and officials falling for it is perhaps more understandable – if no more excusable – given the nature of their incentives) is never made clear. Minister are, it appears, blessed with some special insight into the state of the economy and the timing/speed of the recovery, and instead of just (say) publishing that analysis, they prefer to give handouts (and that is what free price/liquidity insurance is) to developers.

In the MHUD document there is this statement upfront

The secondary objective never seems to get another mention, but the ‘primary objective” is almost worse, for being functionally meaningless. You minimise the cost and risk to the Crown by simply not offering free insurance, and if you must offer such insurance you should do so with a disciplined and transparent model (to, for example, estimate the economic price of the option). But there is nothing of that sort in any of the MHUD material, just a lot of mention of the (extensive) discretion afforded to officials, of whom we may be left wondering both what their expertise is and what their incentives are. Why would we back them to make better choices than financial market participants? And as for “maximising housing supply”, there seems to be no analytical framework there either, including around incentives on developers (who will, of course, prefer free insurance and can be expected to try to game the rules). Will there be any material impact on supply, will any impact be any more than timing, and how will MHUD rigorously evaluate claims put to them by developers? Oh, and isn’t developers finding themselves with overhangs of houses and land part of the way that much lower house prices actually come about?

It is possible the scheme won’t end up being hugely costly. After all, house prices might take off again as interest rates fall. Or officials might err on the very cautious side and very few underwrite grants might be made (or at such deep discounts that the real insurance cost is cheap). But there is just no good or compelling analytical foundation for any sort of intervention of this sort (none provided, none readily conceivable). Even the business cycle argument seems rather flakey. Ministers seem to lament the cyclicality of residential construction (globally, it tends to be one of the most cyclically variable components of GDP), but when they lament the state of the industry, they don’t mention that new residential dwelling consents are still running around twice the level at the trough of the 2008/09 recesssion.

There is also talk about helping to get the cyclical economic recovery underway. Pretty much all the arguments against using fiscal policy for that purpose – I’ve outlined them here repeatedly – apply at least as much to discretionary sector-specific interventions like the Residential Development Underwrite. And, of course, were the Reserve Bank to regard this scheme as being likely to make a material difference it should, all else equal, make them more reluctant to, with less scope to, cut the OCR a lot further.

It is a rather sad reflection of how the quality of New Zealand policymaking has fallen. Perhaps we should be grateful that exchange rate cycles aren’t what they were – and that past governments were less prone to scheme like this – or who knows what sort of free insurance the government would be dreaming up for exporters.

Who knows what the relevant government agencies thought of this scheme. I’ve lodged OIA requests and am particularly interested in any analysis and advice from The Treasury and the Ministry for Regulation.

Every three months or so the hard copy Herald comes with a hefty supplement, the OneRoof Property Report. Yesterday was the latest such supplement. I skip straight to the detailed tables at the back which report, at suburb and district council level, the numbers from the OneRoof-Valocity House Value Index. It is a measure of average (not median) prices, draws on “a range of sources, including settled sales data” and is described as “based on a composite of statistical models and are fully stratified”. The numbers are up to the end of October.

What caught my eye when flicking through the tables was that they had not just percentage changes for the most recent quarter and year, but also enabled comparisons to pre-Covid levels and to the Covid-era peaks.

First, a reminder of that extraordinary period (mostly in late 2020 and 2021) when house prices rose sharply almost everywhere. Since I was having to do all these percentage changes manually I mostly only did the larger population places.

They really were staggering changes. There are a few surprises – I’m at a loss to know why the increase in average prices was materially larger in Taupo than anywhere else – but it is probably more striking just how consistently huge the price increases were, between 40 and 55 per cent, often in little more than a year.

Prices have generally fallen back from those peaks (except in Timaru where the latest observation is also the peak).

But what I was more interested in was where prices were now in real (inflation-adjusted) terms relative to those just prior to Covid. That’s this chart (with the Wellington districts highlighted in red, the Christchurch ones in green, and the mega-region Auckland shown in yellow).

There are really big differences across towns and cities in just a (bit under) four-year period, and no particular bunching around some typical rate of increase (decrease), even bearing in mind that a third of the population is in Auckland.

The dominant story of the 2020/21 increase in house prices seemed to be the toxic combination of extremely low interest rates in a fully-employed and overheating economy in the presence of supply constraints on bringing new residential land and houses to market (all despite an unexpected negative population shock). That story makes a lot of sense, including in the contrast to the 2008/09 recession when much larger cuts in interest rates went hand in hand with lower nominal house prices (there were big negative output and unemployment gaps opening up then).

But as we emerge through the other side of the entire Covid period, it is less clear what explains the divergent pattern of real house price changes over the full period. A non-trivial part of any story about the overall market must be interest rates – the OCR was 1 per cent just prior to Covid and is 5.5 per cent now (with implications for all the retail rates) – but we have an integrated financial market and thus the same interest rates (and tax rates for that matter) in Wellington as in Christchurch.

Supporters of the incoming government might note that Wellington house prices have fallen most in real terms and point out that the prospects of reduced public service numbers might be playing a part. Except that over most of four years public service numbers were rising, often quite strongly, and over the latest three months, when a victory for a National-led government came to seem much more certain, Wellington house prices haven’t done anything materially different than those in Auckland (both up a couple of per cent).

Models which emphasise the importance of supply constraints, land-use restrictions etc (models I champion) suggest that for any given state of economic activity and resource pressure, one should expect to see more responsiveness of house prices to interest rate changes the more binding the supply constraints are. It is an appealing story for Wellington (especially Wellington city) – interest rates have risen a long way- but whether it is really the main explanation would take much more systematic analysis (including trying to take account of the bipartisan limited land use reform legislative change in 2021, and expectations that a new government will alter those measures). But it is hardly as if Christchurch is some paragon of liberal land use.

Perhaps too there is some convergence at work. After all, even now Christchurch house prices are far below those in Auckland, and non-trivially lower than those in Wellington, and people are potentially mobile within New Zealand, especially when the labour market is buoyant.

I don’t purport to have a fully convincing story. The point of the post was mostly just to put the chart out there. And to note that despite the large and rapid increase in interest rates (nominal, but increasingly real too, going by any plausible measure of inflation expectations) real house prices in most of the country are at best basically unchanged from the end of 2019 (in Auckland’s case) or are materially higher than they were then.

By which I mean here the New Zealand housing markets (though how many other glaring New Zealand policy failures could the term be used of?).

I’ve written a couple of columns for the Wellington magazine Capital on housing policy issues (here and here for the 2021 ones) and a few weeks ago the editor asked if I’d do another one. It had to be finalised before the election, which was fine with me as whatever superficial differences there were between the policies in this area of the two main parties none seemed seriously interested in, or to have policies to deliver, dramatically and sustainably lower house prices.

I noticed this morning that the magazine is on the news-stands, but I doubt it is a magazine that is much available or read outside Wellington, so here is a link to close to the final text. Word limits mean one can’t cover everything, or anything in great depth. With a bit more space I’d have made the point that squabbles over interest deductibility, foreign buyers’ bans/taxes and so on really should be peripheral to the heart of the issue, making it easy to bring land into housing use, and easy to build.

The two sides of politics have recently been offering competing (if overlapping) visions of a better-functioning market. Labour and its allies tend to be reluctant to see increases in the physical
footprint of our cities and they back the recent law change in which, for example, three-storey
dwellings can be put up almost anywhere. They are keen on encouraging intensification, almost as
end in itself. For them single-family homes, with a backyard and garden, in our cities are some
throwback to the 1950s, or a future preserve of the relatively wealthy. In and around greater
Wellington, the regional council seems intent on further restricting greenfields development.

National, by contrast, is now offering a different model in which local councils can make choices: they
have to zone enough land residential to cover 30 years of future housebuilding needs, but that can
be done by focusing on intensification or by increasing the physical footprint of cities.

Neither seems to offer a path towards a well-functioning market characterised durably by much cheaper prices for houses and peripheral urban land. Labour’s approach might well increase urban intensity, but nothing in the international experience suggests that will lower house or land prices. National’s approach will tend to increase the physical footprint of some cities – in others, probably
including Wellington, a council with an ideological commitment to density will probably opt to stick
with the Labour approach – but still falls far short of creating genuine competition, where owners of
land in and around urban area are aggressively competing to attract developers and buyers, keeping
down house prices (and, over time, rents).

We need to get councils out of the mix completely, and enable real choice and competition. On the
one hand, allow any geologically-suitable land to be built on to any height, so long as the builders
and developers face the costs of providing water services etc. If someone wants to – although it is
hard to imagine – build a 20-storey apartment block on a big property in the Ohariu Valley there is
simply no pressing public policy reason to stop them. But we also need to enable small groups of
individual property owners (perhaps at the scale of a city block) to act collectively, and cheaply, to
limit development on their own properties, but only on their properties, if that is their choice.
This model seems to have worked very well in big and fast-growing Houston, which has seen not only
the expansion of the physical footprint of the city, but also a lot of intensification. Provide that
option – akin to the covenants seen in plenty of new private subdivisions, allowing for the terms to
be amended by supermajority (perhaps 75 per cent of owners) – owners can collectively make their
own choices, at their own cost, about the development rules for their own blocks of land.
Subsequent choices for more intensive development can also then be managed collectively.

We could, and should, do so much better. Renting and buying should be easy and cheap. The path
to such outcomes – as in so many other sectors – is aggressive competition. Sadly, our councils and
our main political parties aren’t too keen on competition, and still think governments should get to
determine the shape of developments. The young and the poor pay the price.

That penultimate paragraph champions an approach I have been running for some years now. I wrote a post last year on the Houston experience, drawing from the book “Arbitrary Lines” by an American (centre-left I’m sure) urban planner, Nolan Gray. Here are the last few paragraphs of that post.

It is easy to develop on the margins of Houston, it is fairly easy to develop in much of the existing city, but those individual groups of landowners who want to have collective rules for their own properties can do so, and the local authority will enforce those rules on those properties. Deed restrictions are not set in stone for ever, but appear to be often time-limited and requiring a further (super-majority) vote of the then owners (a different group than 25 years earlier typically) at expiry to renew them.

It seems like a model that has a lot to offer here, and which should be looked at more closely by (a) officials, and (b) political parties exploring the best durable way ahead for New Zealand.

Those not operating in good faith – or at least much more interested in other agendas than a) widely affordable housing, and b) property rights (individual and collective) – would no doubt hate it. And, for the moment, they have the momentum – National and Labour last year rushed through legislation that stripped away many existing restrictions, and as a technical matter the government can if it likes force individual city councils to do as it insists. But governments can lose elections too, and if we are serious about much lower sustainable real house prices – and it isn’t clear how many central or local government figures are – we need durable models. The Houston model has proved to work, both in managing the politics and in delivering a city with widely affordable housing, and a wide range of available housing types. And if greenfields development is once again made easy – as distinct from say Wellington where the regional council is currently trying to make it even harder – urban and suburban land prices would fall a lot, and stay down.

One of the arguments some mount for over-riding local community preferences is that “people have to live somewhere”, suggesting that it is unacceptable (even “selfish”) for existing landowners (acting collectively) to protect their own interests and preferences for their own land. But that argument rests only on then unspoken earlier clause “because we will make it increasingly difficult to increase the physical footprint on cities”. Allow easy development, of all types (internalising relevant costs), and there is just no reason to ride roughshod over the collective interests of existing groups of landowners, providing they can restrict things only for their own group of properties.

Some might push back and argue that there is nothing to stop groups of landowners forming private covenants now on existing properties, and I gather that is legally so. But coordination issues and transactions costs are likely to be very high, and people seek to use political channels instead. How much better if we provided a tailor-made readily enforceable collective action model, and then got politicians right out of the business of deciding what sort of houses can be built where.

And, to be clear, as someone living at the end of a hillside cul-de-sac I would have no interest in a Deed Restriction for our property. My interest is ending the evil that is Wellington price to income ratios of 8x or more, and enabling ready affordability for the next generation.

 

Ever since I’ve been writing about house prices – more or less the life of this blog – one of the things that has struck (and sobered) me is that I do not know of (and no one has ever been able to point me to) an example of a country or even a region that having once messed up its housing and urban land regulation, generating absurdly high house price to income ratios has undone things and returned to sustainably low price to income ratios (perhaps fluctuating around three times). There are, of course, many places in the United States where price to income ratios never went crazy. But never having dug a deep hole is a different matter than getting out of one once dug. One reads occasionally – even briefly on this blog – of how easy it is to build in Tokyo (and a culture of frequent demolition and rebuild), but no one ever suggests that Tokyo price to income ratios are low (just much lower than they were a few decades ago at the peak of the 1980s boom).

A month or two back I saw reference somewhere to Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, a new book by an American “professional city planner” Nolan Gray. Last week it turned up in the mail, and being neither very long nor very technical I’ve now read it.

Gray offers a pretty useful introduction to how zoning came to be in the United States (complete, as usual, with various Supreme Court cases), and if much of that isn’t very directly relevant to New Zealand I found it interesting nonetheless. And, of course, some of the best-known restrictions in many areas of the United States – single family dwelling zoning, to the complete exclusion of any other uses for the land (whether two single-storey townhouses, or a corner dairy, or a hairdresser’s), isn’t (and hasn’t really been) a widespread thing in urban New Zealand.

And there is some useful material on some of the potential wider costs to restrictive land use, although on my reading of the relevant papers Grey often jumps too readily to assert causal relationships. But then his background is planning (and is currently studying for a PhD in urban planning) and in some respects the book is best seen as an evangelistic tract (they have their place). No doubt it would appeal quite strongly to that small but vocal group of New Zealand reformers who dream of demolishing whole suburbs, long for light rail systems, and really dislike the idea of backyards (and increasing physical footprints of cities). They often dislike cars too. And often don’t seem too keen on – quite derisive of – people not like them.

And thus as the book went on I was finding it more than a little annoying in places. Gray makes many good points about the inadequacies (and worse) of US zoning systems. But it was pretty clear that he had one particular urban form in mind, and whole agenda of other issues he (and his publisher – explicitly focused on “solving environmental problems”) cared about. And, perhaps reflecting that, there was very little in the book about house prices themselves or the likelihood that his solutions would materially lower them. But there was quite a lot on emissions and energy use (which could simply be priced, as they now largely are in New Zealand), and a dislike of turning farmland (or any other undeveloped land) into suburbs (where, again, any externalities can and should be priced). He seems to have been living in Washington DC when he wrote the book, and enjoying that: we enjoyed our time living in a DC apartment too.

It was also getting frustrating that despite writing about a country that has quite diverse systems, for a long time there was almost no mention of the vast swathes of the United States with (a) population growth, and (b) low and fairly stable house prices.

Until, three-quarters of the way through the book, I came to the chapter headed “The Great Unzoned City”, about Houston. I wouldn’t be bothering with this post if Gray had simply been making the point that real house prices are pretty low, and fluctuate around a fairly stable trend, in Houston. There are, after all, many cities in the annual Demographia tables that are cheaper still. There isn’t that much zoning in Houston, and people have written previously about Municipal Urban Districts (MUDs) which enable land – outside established urban local government boundaries – to be readily developed by private developers, including dealing directly with (internalising) the associated infrastructure costs of development. It was nice to see his, perhaps grudging, recognition that (a) everyone drives in Houston, and b) people are moving to places such as it with cheaper housing. It works. And there has been considerable intensification in Houston over the years.

But the real thing I learned about – and the point of the post – was about the Houston system of Deed Restrictions.

Again, as long as I’ve been writing about housing and possible reform options for New Zealand, I have been intrigued (starting here I think) by the idea of allowing small groups of landowners in existing urban areas (perhaps at the scale of a city block or a small neighbourhood) to set collectively their own land-use rules for their own group of properties. They are an established market mechanisms in new developments in New Zealand, in the form of private covenants, and one could mount an argument that zoning was really an attempt to do much the same thing (collectively manage shared interests, where there are real externalities).

In a report some years ago, the Productivity Commission took a very dim view of private covenants, even suggesting that the government should legislate to restrict their use. But they’ve always seemed to me to be a way through the endless battles (eg the Christchurch City Council stories this morning) around land use, at least among those willing to operate in good faith (and it is never clear how many are). Why not, for example, remove all government restrictions on land use for housing (height, setback, site coverage, “character”, parking or whatever) in existing urban areas AND on undeveloped land, while allowing neighbourhoods/blocks (groups of existing property owners) to adopt by super-majority (and be able to amend by the same super-majority) previous restrictions as applicable to their land, and their land only?

Over the years, I’ve seen a few other people make similar suggestions (eg there was a UK think tank piece a year or two back) but it had about it perhaps an obscure textbook-y feel. It wasn’t clear that anyone had tried it ever, and I myself am inclined to invoke revealed preference arguments at times (if something doesn’t exist anywhere, it is worth at least thinking about whether there is a good – well-grounded, not just political – reason for that).

But it seems that in Houston they have done something very like what I’ve suggested, and it has been in place long enough to see how it works. It is a big, growing, city with pretty-affordable house prices (I’ve been looking recently at small modern units in Christchurch recently – NZ’s least unaffordable city of any size – and it is simply depressing (although also a reminder of what we could do) to check in from time to time and see what one gets for the same money, in a higher wage country, in Houston).

There have been attempts over the years to put in place more extensive zoning systems in Houston. They have failed, at several referenda. But here is Grey:

It is easy to develop on the margins of Houston, it is fairly easy to develop in much of the existing city, but those individual groups of landowners who want to have collective rules for their own properties can do so, and the local authority will enforce those rules on those properties. Deed restrictions are not set in stone for ever, but appear to be often time-limited and requiring a further (super-majority) vote of the then owners (a different group than 25 years earlier typically) at expiry to renew them.

It seems like a model that has a lot to offer here, and which should be looked at more closely by (a) officials, and (b) political parties exploring the best durable way ahead for New Zealand.

Those not operating in good faith – or at least much more interested in other agendas than a) widely affordable housing, and b) property rights (individual and collective) – would no doubt hate it. And, for the moment, they have the momentum – National and Labour last year rushed through legislation that stripped away many existing restrictions, and as a technical matter the government can if it likes force individual city councils to do as it insists. But governments can lose elections too, and if we are serious about much lower sustainable real house prices – and it isn’t clear how many central or local government figures are – we need durable models. The Houston model has proved to work, both in managing the politics and in delivering a city with widely affordable housing, and a wide range of available housing types. And if greenfields development is once again made easy – as distinct from say Wellington where the regional council is currently trying to make it even harder – urban and suburban land prices would fall a lot, and stay down.

One of the arguments some mount for over-riding local community preferences is that “people have to live somewhere”, suggesting that it is unacceptable (even “selfish”) for existing landowners (acting collectively) to protect their own interests and preferences for their own land. But that argument rests only on then unspoken earlier clause “because we will make it increasingly difficult to increase the physical footprint on cities”. Allow easy development, of all types (internalising relevant costs), and there is just no reason to ride roughshod over the collective interests of existing groups of landowners, providing they can restrict things only for their own group of properties.

Some might push back and argue that there is nothing to stop groups of landowners forming private covenants now on existing properties, and I gather that is legally so. But coordination issues and transactions costs are likely to be very high, and people seek to use political channels instead. How much better if we provided a tailor-made readily enforceable collective action model, and then got politicians right out of the business of deciding what sort of houses can be built where.

And, to be clear, as someone living at the end of a hillside cul-de-sac I would have no interest in a Deed Restriction for our property. My interest is ending the evil that is Wellington price to income ratios of 8x or more, and enabling ready affordability for the next generation.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had another round of politicians (so-called “leaders”) doing their utmost to deny any interest in seeing house prices much lower. At 60 per cent below current levels – which would be readily achievable with open and competitive land markets, and a genuinely open and competitive building products sector – we’d be looking at something a lot more reasonable. Real rents would probably then be lower than ever before. But our politicians are terrified of the very idea.

The new Leader of the Opposition made clear his opposition to any suggestion of a sustained fall in house prices (while noting that inevitably there would be some ups and downs). HIs new deputy – and National’s housing spokesperson – did suggest that much lower house price/income ratios might be desirable, with something like flat nominal house prices. And while the Prime Minister at the weekend was quoting as suggesting that she wanted lower house prices – quite a change of tone from her, perhaps just getting ahead of what may already be beginning to happen – she too was at pains to deny any interest in much lower house prices.

Of course, in principle, house price/income ratios could be steadily whittled away by some combination of flat nominal house prices and rising wage rate. But when one starts from such an unbalanced situation as New Zealand now does it would be the project of decades, even if anyone took it seriously. The great and good seem to rather like the idea of this “painless” whittling away, presumably as it enables them to sound serious, and not scary to the already-indebted.

Here is a chart of three scenarios, in each of which nominal house prices hold flat from here. In each scenario I’ve assumed 3 per cent annual growth in wage rates (basically inflation at target on average and something like 1 per cent per annum productivity growth). What differentiates the three scenarios is the starting point – a range from 8 times income to 10 times income.

At best, it takes 33 years for price/income ratios to get back to three – the sort of ratio seen in large chunks of the US, in cities large and small. At best, it would take almost a quarter of a century to get back to a price/income ratio of four.

In the next chart I’ve assumed a starting point of 10 times income and shown the implications for a range of wage growth assumptions. On these scenarios, my kids would my age before house price to income ratios were again what they were when I was their age.

If your idea of political leadership is along the lines of “I must find where the people are going and get out in front of them”, I suppose I understand the apparent political terror at the prospect of much lower house prices, but what a pathetically weak approach, that abdicates any responsibility towards the next generation. These people – “leaders” of our political parties – appear content to get a whole other generation (or two) load up on debt based on house prices they know not to be based on any long-term fundamentals, rather than get to the heart of the issue now.

Of course, some in the media don’t help. I saw last night one journalist suggesting that even getting house prices 25 per cent lower would be reckless, irresponsible, and deeply economically damaging. But politicians put themselves forward, at least notionally, as leaders, people (allegedly) with the best interests of the country at heart. They are supposed to be the communicators, the coalition builders, the persuaders, the people who make things happen…..not those content to sit to the sidelines, idly hoping that well beyond their time in politics things might finally be sorted out.

Take the idea of a 25 per cent fall in house prices. That might take prices back to around where they were at the start of last year. No one who bought before then is put in any particular difficulty. And neither are most of those who bought more recently, as bank lending standards have not been loose, and LVR restrictions have become increasingly onerous. Some would be left temporarily with negative equity, but (a) typically not a large amount, and (b) in a fully-employed economy, modest negative equity isn’t typically a major problem (and to anyone going “easy for you to say”, it was exactly the situation I found myself in a couple of years after buying my first house). But our “leaders” can’t even enthusiastically embrace unwinding the last couple of years’ house price rises.

Of course, the major parties sometimes like to talk about the things they’ve done, up to and including the current amendment to the RMA being rushed through Parliament. But the proof of the pudding is in the prices, and expectations of future prices. Actually, in the political rhetoric as well. Not only have expectations of future house price inflation not gone negative – or even slowed noticeably after the latest “accord” – but the politicians’ own rhetoric reinforces the point: they themselves are scared of embracing lower prices.

Were they actually serious about fixing things, in their own terms of office, some creative thinking (and coalition building) might be required. Big changes in relative prices involve big shifts in wealth. Sharp rises in house prices have skewed the playing field away from the young and the poor. Sharp falls in house prices would skew things sharply away from the very highly-indebted. Of the latter, some don’t (and shouldn’t) command much sympathy at all. If you run a residential rentals business and took on huge amounts of debt to finance your business, well tough. It is a business, in this case built on systematically rigged markets (all that central and local government land-use regulation), and sometimes businesses fail. New entrants will emerge to replace you.

But first home buyers (in particular) command a lot more sympathy, and rightly so in my view. Young families didn’t ask the government to rig the market, or probably even support them doing so. They just want a secure home and backyard to raise their kids, and the only option governments left them for doing so was to pay these absurd price/income ratios, made barely feasible by the sustained decline in neutral interest rates (which in a functioning market should have made purchasing a home easier than ever). For them, some sort of partial compensation scheme might be a fair and necessary path to breaking through the political resistance to much-lower house and land prices. Not a first-best solution perhaps, but a great deal than putting another generation through this quite-unnecessary drama of rigged housing markets. When market prices are miles from the structural fundamentals, there is no merit in trying to foreshadow some very slow and allegedly “painless” adjustment. Better to get the prices (and market regulatory frameworks) sorted out now.

(Oh, and don’t be fooled if prices do fall back a bit over the next 12-18 months. Cyclical fluctuations happen. Falls happen (as over 2008/09). But without fixing the land-use restrictions – and the current RMA amendment does not even come close – the fundamental distortions remain. House prices did fall quite a bit in 2008/09 (even with much lower interest rates), until they rebounded to levels (and price/income ratios) higher than ever.