Housing policy review sought by commission

Press, 15 June 1978, Page 16

Housing policy review sought by commission

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington

The National Housing Commission’s five-year report suggests that the traditional approach to housing management must be extensively overhauled if the commission is to deal with the housing situation. The commission wants a housing strategy to provide a framework within which: 1. The nature and the extent of community responsibility for housing can be defined-clearly. 2. The great diversity of agencies whose activities influence the provision of housing can plan to ensure the best use is made of resources. 3. The responsibilities of these agencies can be Identified and their effectiveness assessed. 4. The impact of housing policies on the relationships and processes of the housing system can be assessed. Any housing strategy will need to take account of the political nature of housing in New Zealand, the complexities of the housing svstem, the time scales of housing activities. and changing concepts of housing. These are big factors to accommodate within a housing strategy, but a strategy would be preferable to gearing housing to political whims. Housing ought to be a field where long-term intentions and planning prevail. The community’s concept of the meaning and value of housing have changed markedly in the last 30 years. No planning system could have foreseen or dealt with all these changes, but the absence of a planning system has exacerbated their impact Today, concern for the quality of the residential environment has — to a considerable extent — replaced

the emphasis on the quantity of housing available.

The commission has found that methods of assessing the value of housing — for the purposes of policy formation and planning — have “not generally kept pace” with these changing attitudes. The continued emphasis on the production .of new dwellings demonstrates this point. As a result of the longterm economic and social costs of housing, investment programmes and the management of existing housing stock had been badly neglected, said the commission’s report. New Zealand is no closer to having a national housing strategy than it was in 1971, when the commission was established. The commission attributed this to “a lack of sense of purpose and inability to deal with the complexities of housing. Under these circumstances, it is natural for New Zealanders to look to central government for guidance.” Having said that, the commission called for the active and co-ordinated participation from private enterprise, regional and local government, and central government. It was less concerned about the precise way in which this might be achieved than to alert everyone to the need for it to be done. The commission did not advocate the establishment of any new organisation to oversee the development of a national housing strategy. It considered the existing organisations should be mobilised by the Minister of Housing. It did not. however, consider the whole responsibility of initiating and sustanine a national housing ing down as road blocks if government. While recognising the need

for continuing government support if a national housing strategy were to become a reality, the commission believed that local government should be given more responsibility for the detailed management of housing. Unless the necessary intitiatives were taken in the near future, within the next 10 years the New Zealand housing situation “will deteriorate to the extent that largely avoidable hardships will be inflicted on a growing proportion of the community.” The distribution and use of the country’s housing would become increasingly inequitable and inefficient, said the commission.