New Zealand’s housing crisis is worsening

IF THERE IS one subject that animates New Zealanders more than rugby or pandemic restrictions, it is the cost of housing. Home-ownership has been a national obsession ever since the British, a people notoriously obsessed with claiming title to piles of bricks, first colonised the Pacific islands. Emigrants left draughty terraced homes for the “Kiwi dream” of a “quarter-acre block”. That fantasy has become increasingly difficult to realise. The average home in Auckland, the commercial capital, now costs NZ$1.4m ($935,000), 35 times the median income.