mudguard:

 

Handsomedan:

 

I live on the North Shore. I see a LOT of vacant land that could be built on. Albany Mall is surrounded by vacant land just begging to be built on - high density housing next to a mall and a bus station? perfect! It's probably all zoned industrial or some such, but there's definitely plenty of land. 

 

 

Problem is it would be sold at $750,000 per section I imagine!

 

And that crazy price is largely driven by a lack of supply, land banking, and councils not rezoning more land residential, largely because of the infrastructure needed. It has cause land prices in my town to double since covid. It all seems to be very closely controlled, and land is drop fed onto the market to keep supply low.  IMO land bankers should be taxed on undeveloped land to . I am not sure if the RMA reforms are going to help with this. But much of the houses price prices is the rise in the land value, and not the actual building itself as much.

Also many NZers simply don't want to live in some of these horrible mass high density housing developments. I doubt too many of these developers are living in these houses, or would do so out of choice. NZ does not do it well. It is why we get urban sprawl, because many people want a small garden to grow things and a small lawn to get some UV each day.  Isn't that one of the advantages of living in NZ? But then that comes down to what population do we want NZ to have, and even the government doesn't seem to have a plan on this and is consulting.

But if the world are looking at reducing pollution etc, we need to probably look at capping the NZ population and growth, so we can be sustainable. Surely that should be part of the environmental emergency the government declared, and housing is a big part of this