THE PRESS TUESDAY, JULY 2, 1985. Housing in Queenstown

Press, 2 July 1985, Page 20

THE PRESS TUESDAY, JULY 2, 1985. Housing in Queenstown

Queenstown, the South Island’s number one tourist spot, has a problem providing enough suitable accommodation for the large number of people who work in the tourist and allied industries. Tourism, of course, is labour intensive; that is one of its main attractions to a country with high unemployment such as New Zealand. Several hundred people — mainly young, single New Zealanders — work in Queenstown in jobs directly associated with the tourist trade. For these people, finding somewhere to live in a town where hotel and motel beds far outnumber the permanent residents is not an easy task. As well as being labour intensive, tourism is a gold-plate .industry that can distort land values and community balance. In larger cities, the effect is not so pronounced; in a place like Queenstown, rocketing prices for hotel and motel sites tend also to drive up the prices for residential properties and to reduce markedly the pool of cheaper rental accommodation. The influx of younger, single people eager for jobs in hotels, motels, and businesses ancillary to them, usually proves to be a transient population, highly mobile both within the local workforce and in their movement in and out of the district. This has been Queenstown’s experience. These features of employment and accommodation in the resort were confirmed in a recent survey of Queenstown employers and their staff. The results of the survey were not altogether new; similar observations have been made before, but have lacked, perhaps, the sort

of statistical data provided by the survey. Given the demands of tourism and the size of Queenstown, the shortage of staff accommodation is predictable and, to the extent that some developers have continued to build hotels and motels rather than staff flats or hostels, the problem is one of the industry’s own making.

It is surprising, therefore, that most of the employers questioned in the survey believe that the local authority or central Government should remedy the problem by establishing staff flats or hostels, or providing land for low-cost housing. Some of the employers who responded to the survey said that they intended to provide staff accommodation, but found finance a big constraint. The inference is that they want taxpayer or ratepayer help to improve their ability to attract and hold staff. To be fair, the point must be made that about one employer in five already provides accommodation for some staff; others subsidise rent payments for their staff, or make specific allowance for higher rentals in higher wages. These latter approaches are the appropriate market responses, particularly at a time when the Government is ridding itself of all manner of subsidies and incentives to special interest groups. Businesses that are prepared to reap the rewards of the tourist trade must be prepared also to meet the costs, in this instance the costs of land, buildings, and accommodation. In Queenstown these costs reflect nothing so much as the activities and expectations of the businesses themselves.