Meeting notes

How are people affected culturally by displacement?

There are already layers of displacement that have happened

Always racialised and minority targeted

Economic and social structure that push for gentrification

Restructure environment → rises prices

Changes living resources

Consumerism habits change with gentrification?

Production: developers and investors change amenities and resources

Consumption: people desire resources of living close to city ('back to the city movement')

Both production and consumption happening at the same time

Move in and buy out shops to create resources for the incoming residents

Ideas of local economy stimulation?

Ultimately secure, public housing

Liveable benefits

Transitional economy jobs for when industry closed down in the 1980s during neoliberalism

Public housing developments

For low and mid income households

Large scale urban regeneration projects

Originally state owned public housing land → 1/3 public housing, 1/3 'affordable housing', 1/3 private housing

Gov working with developers and regeneration projects

"We shouldn't have spatial concentration of people living in poverty" but problem is poverty itself

Doesn't benefit community that's already there

Hopes that low income community will learn from the people who move in

KiwiBuild — Government's affordable housing project

Within a certain income bracket but the bracket is quite high

After 3 years, affordable houses can be moved to private market. All this affects surrounding neighbourhoods and drives up rent and housing prices

Endogenous gentrification

Gentrification on colonised land

Maori and Pasifika mainly impacted

Their whenua are outside of where they live

People were removed from their land — which is housing, food, resources, looking after self and family

Pushes people into further marginalisation

"When land is taken from you, no form of monetary benefits will change the context because you don't have your land back"

That's why people have an obsession with public property — because people acknowledge the importance of land

Individual ownership?

There are forms of public ownership that ensures wellbeing

Poverty is impacted by so many other things other than the house people live in

Maori provided by hapu and iwi

Trying to solve a crisis with the thing that is causing the crisis (stimulating the housing market)

how do we ensure everyone has a home that is secure and good?

increase public housing → people move in because much more affordable (instead of pay private landlord) → gets rid of investment model bc people no longer see it as a commodity when there's an alternative

Jacinda's property-tax bill

demand-side solutions: ordinary people want to become property investors

Why we need an alternative rental market if people no longer rent their properties out

Need to move investment away from essential resources

Is shared housing actually feasible?

Government can get into debt to do that/borrow money (not in bad state to borrow money)

Invest in public housing is investing in jobs and the economy

Mass programme of public housing

Instead of selling land to private developers, build public housing and provide resources to hapu and iwi to build houses (objectives to address Maori homelessness)

Buy existing stock and bring it into public housing stock

~end of housing crisis~

0 political will

(Brightline test to 10 years)

(Look into first labour party)

Catering to Middle New Zealand

Convincing Middle New Zealand that public housing is a good idea

Reinvigorate the imagination of what it could be (sustainable, beautiful, well built housing that everyone could have)

What state housing used to be — middle class used to buy them up and do them up and make kiwiana housing. When public planning was a strong thing. Middle class people want to live in them, they just don't want poor people to live in them.

Building solidarity between people who are homeless and people who are private renters (who are paying over 30% of their income for housing) (and want to become private investors).

Why do they have broken solidarity?

A lot of young people activity support gentrification because they thought it would help them get houses

Fantasised good transportation networks, walkable cities, close to city

At the cost of gentrification and these regenerations happening on top of public housing land