Issue #886

by David Gibbs

We’ve been here before. There is simply not enough rental accommodation to go anywhere near meeting the demand and that’s fuelling the current worker crunch.

In fact, it seems to have got worse. This time around, despite the fact we don’t have enough workers, we still don’t have enough flats, apartments or houses. And people who do have rental accommodation appear to walking a tightrope, facing rising rents or eviction, if the landlords feel they can get a better return from new tenants or Airbnb.

Rents can go up 30% or more, which means some of our best staff are now making the decision to leave Queenstown or the country, simply because they can’t find anywhere to stay within their budget.

According to this week’s readers’ poll nearly 70% know someone and I personally know of three such cases, including one of our own staff, where Nelson, Perth or China have all been recipients of our loss. None of these were hospo roles btw. Even people who never thought they would have a problem are starting to worry.

While landlords are at the pointy end of the crisis and some, probably too many, are taking full advantage, they’re just making the best returns they can on their investment. Greedy, yes, but it takes a fair bit of altruism, in capitalist 2023, to forego hundreds or thousands of pounds a month extra for the greater community good, or to help other businesses house staff.

And the Queenstown hobby of blaming the council doesn’t ring too true either. Under the previous mayor, Jim Boult, QLDC had a decent crack a reigning in Airbnb and short-term holiday lets, proposing a bed tax and also to reduce the number of days a property can bet let out, without resource consent, from 90 to 28. It would have been a good start but facing blowback from property owners and from the $68 billion company Airbnb, who likely would have won any court battle thanks to the permissive Resource Management Act, little was actually done.

What we really need is Central Government to act. We need emergency legislation that makes it easy and cheap for developers to build rental and affordable housing stock, but gives councils the power to limit the percentage of new developments that can become holiday lets. Anything new must be a decent mix of rental property - with rents benchmarked against the living wage - affordable housing with no-Airbnb clause, then mid-range and higher-end, a good proportion of which can be Airbnb’d.

Queenstown Lakes Community Housing Trust is unlikely, realistically, to be able to keep pace with demand, landlords will act in their best interests, the free market won’t solve it, the council seems largely powerless, so we need Wellington to act.