As the last flicker of hope that the plane might not be landing at the South Pole itself was fading, the hostess on board nudged my shoulder to let me know that I must buckle myself up to prepare for descent. Back hunched, my eyes had been glued to the aircraft icon of my flight tracker screen until then, wondering how further beneath the globe would that icon go. Her colleague on air made an announcement for a touchdown soon at Auckland airport. With a sigh of relief I sat up to straighten my seat.
Muhammad Ali, who the world very sadly lost this week, had commented at the moment when he first laid foot in New Zealand: “Nine people out of 10 in the United States don’t know this place exists.” He had said, “like Columbus discovered America, I have discovered you.” When I got off that plane, this is how I too would have liked to pronounce my feelings.
I soon found out from Chirag, my partner, who lives in New Zealand, that every year there are at least 66,000 people who do not share Muhammad Ali’s and my feelings. These are the annual numbers of immigrants that flock to join the five million population already living on this fragment of a land. large numbers of people have moved to New Zealand — a record high this year since 1978, such that now there is hardly any more place there to live.
In Auckland alone, 13,000 houses need to be built every year for 30 years, to provide housing for all. Current construction levels are just 9,700 houses a year, which cuts a dreadful gap in supply versus demand. Elsewhere, in london, an estimated 80,000 new houses a year are needed by the city’s local councils. In Indian cities, there are households set up on road sides, for lack of proper housing. Globally 1.6 billion people live in substandard housing, more than a billion live in slums, and 100 million are just homeless — and these are all increasingly urban residents.
Ironically there are vast amounts of land lying unbuilt in New Zealand and in many other parts of the world. Obviously the crowds want to all live in the same places, preferring cities where jobs, schools, and hospitals stand a greater chance of availability and quality.
Globalisation opens up borders. When the door is open to a home offering better comfort than those in the neighbourhood, then people will come. With the arrival of these unexpected new people, the available resources are squeezed. There are only two ways to go from there — create more resources or slam the door shut.
In london last week, Mayor Sadiq Khan attacked foreign investors for using homes in the capital as “gold bricks for investment”. He warned that building thousands of new homes a year in london would not solve the city’s housing crisis if they are all bought by investors in the Middle East and Asia.
During the same fortnight in UK itself, the people of St Ives in Cornwall voted in a referendum for rules that would compel any new home to be only sold to authentic local residents of St Ives, slamming the door shut on foreign buyers.
There are plenty more people in cities elsewhere too who can not afford to buy homes, and they are angry about it. Governments cannot implement an effective housing plan and blame foreigners for it. Controls are then thrown in to prevent flows of foreign money and people. This is despite everything that these very people know about economics telling them that any form of protectionism is damaging and ends up making everyone only poorer.
My trip to Chirag’s hometown coincided with the city’s stormiest week of the year, an important one nonetheless that presented the country’s eighth national Budget. NZD 2.5 billion (approx USD 1.75 billion) of New Zealand’s Budget was pegged to cover costs of population growth and debt. The rise in net migration, on top of natural increases, has been putting pressure on the health system, schools, housing, and transport, and the Budget has had to make provisions to tackle this.
This story thereafter follows a familiar pattern. The pressure on housing is particularly acute in Auckland, where a large proportion of migrants are choosing to settle. The average house is nine times the average income, making the people rather unhappy. The Government, until now, has chosen not to close the door on immigrants. It has instead freed up surplus land for housing — a scheme that is clearly not yet successful because more than NZD 50 million put toward the surplus land scheme has already been exhausted, and not even the first house on this land has been built yet. Will failure produce another cynicIJ
Showing me around Auckland despite the thunder in the skies, Chirag also pointed out through the rain-dripping car window to houses he owned, built, or had relocated. “What do you mean ‘relocated’IJ” I was explained that an old house that no one wished to live in is transported to another location to be recycled into a new one, and so the original land where that house stood can be freed up to build a new structure. This lowers the overall price of the new ‘recycled’ house as well.
There are many other creative ways that movement of people, goods, and information can be leveraged for ensuring everyone has a roof over their heads at a location they want it.
More foreign investments can be brought in to create education and healthcare institutions located outside the cities. Or organisations could be incentivised to permit employees to work virtually from home. My point here is not to list out solutions, but to emphasise that indeed the gifts of globalisation could spread people out and declog the housing bottleneck.
Home is the most popular and frequented establishment on earth and yet it has nothing to do with place. It is ratified more by the fondest memories than the fine print of passport. And history tells us that discriminating against people on the grounds of where they were born rarely ends well either. And so it is just growing harder to define who is and isn’t ‘local’ — this too is a gift of globalisation.
It is precisely this that makes the solutions to the housing challenges faced by Auckland, london, St. Ives, or any other city in the world, more complex. The solutions, whatever they might be, will be increasingly slow to implement. There will indeed be very little leeway granted to go wrong because there are lives and imaginations involved. But just giving up and in cynicism slamming the door shut on anyone is never ever a good idea.
The writer is Chief Sustainability Officer for the group of companies, Jindal Steel and Power ltd. She is a Global leadership Alumna of the World Economic Forum. miniya.chatterji@jindalsteel.com