The Enemies of Sunshine and Space

Chris Bishop is cutting state house building and unleashing a slumlords’ charter, but instead of fighting against this, the left has entered an unholy alliance with property developers

IT’S A POLITICAL MYSTERY, this alliance between the Left and well-connected property developers. The Right’s covert dealings with commercial greed-heads has for long been a disreputable feature of its brand. The Left, to its credit, still has to work at corruption. Doing the wrong thing doesn’t come naturally … yet. So, what is it that the Left is telling itself as it lines up behind National’s Chris Bishop? What good thing do they believe themselves to be doing?

When this question is put to them, there’s a certain kind of leftist that will reassure you that increasing urban density is the fastest and most effective way of getting homeless people housed. Constructing high-rise apartments along key public transport corridors will provide affordable accommodation to young workers and students – liberating them for the cold, damp, poorly-ventilated and inadequately maintained properties currently providing landlords with a handsome return on their investment.

With a considerably steelier glint in their eye, these same leftists will tell you that the only people steadfastly refusing to see the wisdom of Bishop’s policy are the selfish Baby-Boomers who long ago purchased what were then cheap and nasty old villas, “did them up”, and watched their value skyrocket to dizzying heights.

Some of these Boomers (many of them card-carrying leftists) sold at the top of the market, pocketing huge and tax-free capital gains, which they then invested in a one, two, many rental properties, becoming fully paid-up members of the landlord class. These “investors” aren’t all that keen on urban density. Flooding the rental market with affordable rental accommodation, a policy which could hardly fail to exert an unhelpful downward pressure on their rents, is not what they were expecting.

These are the sort of Boomers who ask themselves the question made famous by the lead characters in the 1980s classic movie “The Big Chill”: “How did revolutionaries like us get to be so rich?”

Then there are the Boomers who’ve spent their lives immersed in the lyrics of Graham Nash’s “Our House”, with its “two cats in the yard”, open fires, and flower arrangements. These Boomers’ do indeed dwell in, “a very, very, very fine house” and they’re not about to let it be caught in the shadow of a six-storey apartment block lacking even one stained-glass window – let alone a decorative finial.

The feelings these Boomers have for property developers (and their little helpers in local government) bear close resemblance to the feelings they once had for supporters of the 1981 Springbok Tour and members of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child. As far as they’re concerned, the urban density brigade aren’t leftists, they’re vandals. “Progressives” may deride such people as “Nimby” (Not In My Backyard) naysayers, but in their own eyes they’re heroic defenders of “precious local heritage”.

It’s a horrible combination of intergenerational avarice and envy, fuelled by the grim certainty that none of the generations coming up after them will ever have it as good as the Boomers. To say that this situation rankles among those born after 1965 is to massively understate their distress. As far as those fated to grow up in the Twenty-First Century are concerned, it is NOT “OK Boomer” – not okay at all.

The Devil himself could hardly have devised a scenario more likely to mobilise all seven of the deadly sins. Nor was there any shortage of property investors and developers willing to audition for the roles of Lucifer’s demonic minions. With so much envy and resentment to play upon, all those interested in making outrageous profits had to do was whisper “New Urbanism” in the ears of ambitious Gen-X lobbyists, who would, in turn, pass the concept on to ambitious Millennial politicians who’d never met a Boomer city father whose retreating back did not look better than his aggressive front. “Go to Europe,” they would say, “look at what’s happening there. Ask all these selfish Boomer Nimbys how many Frenchmen and women, how many Germans, live in detached bungalows!”

Wrong question. Frenchmen and women, Germans, and a plethora of other nationalities, live in apartments because only aristocrats, tycoons, and football players get to live in stand-alone dwellings surrounded by lawns and trees. When your population is numbered in the tens-of-millions, it’s difficult to organise your citizens’ accommodation in any other way. But ask those same apartment-dwelling Europeans, Americans and Asians if they would like to live in a stand-alone dwelling surrounded by lawns and trees, and you will elicit a very different response.

If the population of the British Isles was just 5 million, how many of its citizens would prefer to go “up”, as opposed to “out”? Even when the British population numbered in excess of 40 million, those on the left of politics were far more interested in spreading ordinary people out than they were in stacking them up. Indeed, it is strange that the disciples of New Urbanism speak so infrequently about the spacious planned communities of yesteryear. Genuine leftists would be talking a lot less about empowering developers to increase urban density, and a lot more about central and local government designing and building green cities and new towns.

Instead we are invited to accept and grow accustomed to this unholy alliance between right-wing greed-heads and left-wing Boomer-haters. Chris Bishop can make a bonfire of building codes and regulations, and rather than condemn his neoliberal recklessness, Labour and Green politicians turn up with additional jerry-cans of gasoline. Architects and construction firms warn that the Housing Minister’s policies will produce nothing but slums, crime and mental illness. The Left has nothing to say.

It really is remarkable. Housing New Zealand, after six years of fits and starts, finally hits its stride and builds thousands of new state houses annually. What happens? The new Coalition Government commissions a dodgy dossier damning Housing New Zealand, and uses it to justify an abrupt shutting-off of affordable housing supply – just as it was surging. In its place Bishop issues a slumlords’ charter. To the windfall tax-cuts his government has already delivered to the landlord class (which includes two-thirds of New Zealand’s parliamentarians) he now adds every conceivable incentive for the greedy and the tasteless to do their worst.

Bishop has staked his career on collapsing the price of houses and opening the way for the younger generation to reclaim the dream of home ownership. One can only imagine the response of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the big Aussie mortgage-holders if this promise is fulfilled. The international credit-rating agencies have already warned the Coalition Government that a collapse in house prices would set the entire New Zealand economy on fire. What will those who insist that Bishop is onto a winning strategy say then?

How painful it must be for genuine socialists to witness the political heirs of the left-wing politicians who designed, funded and built thousands of very, very, very fine houses, having so little to say about the deliberate re-creation of the oppressive “urban density” from which so many of poor New Zealanders, with their government’s assistance, broke free in the 1930s and 40s. How sad that so many on the Left, which used to be about sunlight and space, are throwing in their lot with those who see no profit in either.

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Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

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