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Property Bubbles Down Under?

By | | Housing
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In an eerie echo of statements made before the collapse of American housing bubbles in 2006, leading Australian bankers claim that Australia is not suffering a housing bubble. Yet prices are unsustainably high and a collapse is inevitable, though when it will happen may be unpredictable.

Median home prices in Sydney are AU$795,000 (US$606,000). More Sydney suburbs have median prices over AU$2 million than under AU$600,000.

America’s 2008 financial crisis didn’t lead Australian housing prices to fall. In fact, prices in Sydney have grown 106 percent and in Melbourne 88 percent since then. Ominously, however, prices in Melbourne, which are nearly as great as in Sydney, are falling for the first time in four years.

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Planning Is the Problem, Not the Solution

By | | Regional planning
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New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Bill English, is an antiplanner. “The justification for planning is to deal with externalities,” he noted in a speech given a few weeks ago. But, he continued, “what has actually happened is that planning in New Zealand has become the externality. It has become a welfare-reducing activity.”

As is the case in many American (and Canadian and Australian) urban areas, planning has added tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of a home in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest urban area. Recent New Urbanist rules, English says, “add $50,000 to $100,000 to the cost of an apartment.” Even more costs are added by Auckland’s urban-growth boundary. One study found that the costs of one of these rules were six times the benefits.
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It’s even worse than English says. Planning has become a way for the middle class to keep the working class out without being overt about it. It has become a way for relatively wealthy people to enhance their wealth at everyone else’s expense. Planners’ build-up-not-out mentality ends up destroying the character of the cities it is supposed to save. Finally, planning results in serious intergenerational equity problems, as parents get rich off their housing equity while children can’t afford to live in the cities in which they grew up.

Housing Apartheid

By | | Book reviews, Housing
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Smart-growth land-use controls are creating a generation of renters and result in “social and housing apartheid,” say economists Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub. Writing from and about Auckland, New Zealand, they note that, since 1995, the cost of developable land has risen 73 percent faster than incomes (p. 52).

They admit that demand has played a role in housing prices, but not the principle role. “Over time, house prices can fluctuate considerably, but, in the normal scheme of things, only in a transitory way,” they write. “Prices will rise to signal the market to make more houses and then fall back when supply matches demand. But house prices can rise continuously, relative to incomes and rents, if there are physical or regulatory constraints that stop supply” (p. 51).

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Government Planning Impedes Christchurch Recovery

By | | City planning, News commentary
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It’s been more than three years since much of Christchurch, New Zealand, was devastated by an earthquake, and recovery is far from complete. Now, a new report from the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development blames the government for hampering the recovery.


Government meddling has not only hampered recovery, it made the effects of the earthquake worse. The owner of the building that collapsed onto this bus, killing all but one of the occupants, had wanted to demolish it before the earthquake, but the city held it up because it was considered a historic structure.

This is a familiar tale: after a natural disaster, instead of letting people rebuild, government planners attempt to impose their ideals of what the city should look like on the supposedly blank landscape. The same thing happened in New Orleans: people from New Urban architect Andrés Duany to the free-market Mercatus Center agree that government planners have impeded recovery of that city after Hurricane Katrina.

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