Why I care about affordable Housing

In all honesty, my heart doesn't bleed for the young who've been ripped-off with housing. It bleeds for immigrants with kids, who have to work two low-paying jobs to cover crazy rents, but that's about it.

Why? Because the vast majority of renters today would be just like their landlords if they could. They, too, would never elect a government that threatened to cut their property value in half, by allowing natural markets to function. They would only vote for protectionism, like the boomers and Gen-X do today.

So the New Zealand youth are, ultimately, eating the karma of their own ugly standard. Indeed, when young people buy a house today, they largely do so because they think the price can only go up, which demonstrates that they're motivated to play the rip-off game themselves further down the track. So again - no bleeding heart from me. It's all the same people doing what they do (to each other).

What I care about is the long-term social impact of unaffordable housing.

We've created a situation where it's almost impossible for people to have kids at a healthy and youthful age, without having them abandon nearly all their disposable income. So they don't. They wait years and even decades until they're worn-out and almost infertile before having kids, if they choose to have them at all.

This is toxic. Every species on the planet prioritises strong fertility - except us.

This has happened, I believe, primarily because we are a pure democracy. Meaning, the majority (home owners) make the rules and the minority (renters) are left politically irrelevant. No politician wants to declare that they intend to collapse house prices by 70%. And they don't. They know that the majority who vote for them won't tolerate that.

As we inflate property prices with strategic scarcity (and call it progress) we see ourselves wrecking our society on the most important level of all - fertility. Truly we have become a comedy.

I hope the better part of us can find a way to cut loose from the mob, and make a more honourable society to the end of it. That's better than being financially swallowed-up and rendered near-infertile by democracy as we know it, at its worst.

-Andrew Atkin