It revealed its preferred approach towards building affordable houses
The National Party is determined to abandon the KiwiBuild brand if it’s elected into government next year.
It criticised the government for having to buy back KiwiBuild houses in areas with low demand, emphasising that the programme has “simply become a bailout for housing developers who had surplus land and wanted to be rid of it.”
“We will abandon the KiwiBuild brand as it has become apparent that smacking a KiwiBuild sticker on a house makes it harder, not easier, to sell,” the National Party said in a discussion document on housing released on Monday.
Read more: KiwiBuild reset is bad news for low- and middle-income earners – thinktank
The party did not specifically say that it would stop building or underwriting the development of low-cost homes and selling them to first-home buyers, but clarified that it prefers to focus more on redeveloping government-owned land.
“National, through the Hobsonville Land Company, oversaw the redevelopment of the former Hobsonville Airbase into a new township of 11,000 residents,” the discussion document said. “Hobsonville Land Company become ‘HLC’ and began to undertake similar redevelopments across New Zealand. Land was sold to developers with a contractual agreement that at least a third of the houses were priced at affordable levels. “Redevelopments were initiated on government land in Papakura, and on Housing New Zealand land in Porirua, Mt Roskill, Tamaki, Northcote and Mangere.”
“Housing New Zealand redevelopments generally take older, rundown houses on large sections and replace them with three times the number of warm, dry homes, increasing the total number of dwellings by a factor of about three. At least one third of the houses are returned to Housing New Zealand, with another third mandated as affordable housing and the final third being sold to the private market,” it further explained.
“When National left office, we had more than 27,000 homes in the development pipeline ready for the new government. Labour criticised these developments while in Opposition. Now in government, Labour has shifted this programme wholesale into its KiwiBuild brand.”
