Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomasfl | Hacker News Reader

The problem with New Zealand seems to be that if you have an education, it is often no where else to use that education than Auckland or Wellington. I have never been to New Zealand, but the problem seems to be very similar to the housing problems we have in Norway. The sub arctic capital city of Oslo, has ridiculously high prices.

View on HN

Stupid question... is the problem with not enough land (eg. if you want to live in manhattan, you literally have nowhere to build, unless you demolish something else),... or is there enough buildable (physically) land in "near-enough-to-commute" locations, but the government doesn't allow people to build (large enough) housing there?

In Wellington at least (where I live), there are limits on the density of housing that can be built (and height). Recently, the council was going to free up some of these restrictions a bit, but there was a lot of backlash by residents who didn't want the "character" of their neighbourhoods to be affected, so the relaxation in the rules has been a lot less.

Wellington is a bit different in that there is a limit on the amount of empty land in the centre and the neighboroughing regions: it's quite hilly and pinned in geographically, and most of the central regions are fairly built-up already. Some areas (near the CBD) were also built up on reclaimed land from the harbour, and what with earthquakes, that's not great...

“pinned in” - meaning “penned in”? I can see they’d sound the same in a New Zealand accent so just idly wondering

"penned for pinned" is in the Eggcorn database[1] - doesn't look like "pinned for penned" is yet but probably worth a contribution (also see the pen <=> pin dictionary definition in the linked thread.)

[1] http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=7251

New Zealand has lots of land available. Zoning can be an issue. That said we have very low density housing.

I think compliance costs and times don't help. Neither does our building code. We should allow the use of materials that have been approved in more advanced countries like Germany.

The real cause has been low interest rates. People borrow as much as they can. At sub 2% rates they can borrow a lot and are pushing prices up.

There's a lot of land. New Zealand is about the 2/3rds the size of California. It just has to do with lack of development. About the same size if you include the habitable land / non desert.

I suspect a big part of it is that many people who would have built a new house during the covid years (people are always building) instead changed to buying an existing (since building was reduced/restricted).

And if you build a house you're adding to the housing market (assuming it wasn't a teardown/rebuild) whereas if you buy it's just shuffling existing stock around.

And even Auckland and Wellington are generally pathetic in terms of pay compared to Australia, or anywhere else in the world.

Not true, I've been in Palmerston North scince getting my degree. There are always high skill Jobs going and not enough people willing to move here. Our house prices are very high as well.

> Palmerston North ... always high skill Jobs going and not enough people

? links to good job boards ?

I know several people (stem MSc / PhD)s who are on and off looking into migrating. They would come with around NZD 0.8-2.4M net capital from selling their current houses.

I'm not sure what field to look in exactly so here is a very broad search.

https://www.seek.co.nz/jobs-in-information-communication-tec...

We have Massey and plant and food research that often have more academic roles. You'll normally see a few pop up each year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com