[beachy]

Good rant but a bit of a simplification.

NZers love to go off and do their OE (overseas experience) typically in their early-mid twenties often in hubs like London. A kiwi in their 30s who hasn't lived and worked overseas is the odd one out at parties.

Many of those people do extremely well. I know several who made millions in banking and IT.

Then they come back to NZ when they have kids and put that money into housing. These are some of the people paying $3M for a house. Others are people who have inherited wealth from their parents who invested big in NZ property last century (e.g. boomers). Others are wealthy immigrants from UK, SA, US even.

Yes that sucks for the local who has only been earning $61K but it's reality.

Add to that a weird situation where there is no capital gains tax on housing, with all political parties too scared to address that giant elephant in the room, and NZ offering an awesome lifestyle in many ways except for salaries, and and you have a perfect recipe for high house prices.

Is it sustainable? My view is that it is (not in the sense sustainable == good, but in the sense sustainable == can keep going for a long time). There's no god given right to affordable housing. There was a period in the 1950s where there was prosperity for all, but looking back, that was the anomaly, not the current state of affairs.

[markdown]

> There's no god given right to affordable housing.

Sure, but if you take everything and leave nothing for the masses, sooner or later they'll make your life miserable too. Whether that happens with regular ole crime, or revolution, one way or another the scales will be balanced.

If you want a comfortable life in your mansion, you'd better make sure that your butler and doorman can afford comfortable homes of their own and a decent standard of living.

[jmyeet]

You say it sucks but that's the reality. Why? It doesn't have to be this way.

Denying people shelter is violence.

We could end homelessness with a fraction of what we spend on the police and prisons. Yet we'd rather spend money on an increasingly militarized police force and the convict slavery system to protect property prices so Jeff Bezos can have $220 billion instead of $200 billion.

War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution. When people such as myself advocate for a decent basic standard of living at the expensive of the wealthy having slightly less, we're really trying stave off the guillotines.

[niemandhier]

Currently in many countries the social contract stipulates that the majority of the population refrains from voting for a system that confiscates the wealth of the top 5% and in exchange their lives are bearable.

Trump promised to address the problems of low wage workers, and in many places jihadists style themselves as social reformers.

Since NZ does not have the luxury to blame it on refugees or neighbours, I don’t think it is sustainable.

[jamesblonde]

Sounds exactly like Ireland of like 25 years ago.

[eli_gottlieb]

> There's no god given right to affordable housing.

There's also no god-given right to avoid a guillotine. These are all choices people make, and can make differently if given reason to do so.