This particular article caught my eye in the Herald today probably because of the fact that 3 of the places they talk about i.e Tauranga (basically the Mount), Auckland and the Gold Coast are where I am based.
The article follows and I have interjected occasionally with my comments in italic and preceded with tpr:
Tauranga is in the top 20 of the world’s overly-expensive places to live,(tpr: however my experience would be that more accurately this would be Mount Maunganui), and Auckland is not far behind, in an international survey of housing affordability, released today.
The survey ranked Vancouver, Canada, as the most unaffordable place to live, followed by a swag of Australian places – Sydney, Darwin, and the Gold and Sunshine Coasts. (tpr: Certainly the Gold Coast continues to buck most trends however this is not a surprise as the Gold Coast is a set geographically restricted area with no additional space to expand into, i.e there is nowhere to just open up a new subdivision as you can in say Sydney or Brisbane. The Gold Coast is restricted by the Hinterland which is mostly reserve on one border, the New South Wales border, the ocean and Brisbane itself on it’s northern border.)
The survey was conducted by Australian firm Demographia, and involved respondents in six western countries: USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.
It did not include Hong Kong, however, where housing is notoriously expensive. (tpr:typical, so really add at least one more city to the list above the ones in this article.)
Here’s where the New Zealand cities placed in the top 60 on the “severely unaffordable” scale:
20th Tauranga
22nd Auckland
31st Christchurch
41st Wellington
47th Dunedin
Palmerston North, Napier/Hastings and Hamilton were also described as “seriously unaffordable”, while not making the 60 listed on the table. (tpr: this is quite an amazing statement really, what do they mean by severely unaffordable? I know of property that you can buy in Mount Maunganui for under $350,000 and it is walking distance to the beach, how can that be deemed extremely unaffordable)
Tauranga is one of the retirement capitals of New Zealand. It’s one of the country’s fastest growing cities, with a 14 per cent increase in population between the 2001 census and the 2006 census. The current population is estimated to be around 118,000 (2009).
The most expensive place in the United States to live was Honolulu, Hawaii (6th overall) and in Great Britain it was Bournemouth (7th).
Australia was by far the least affordable of the countries surveyed, followed by New Zealand, Britain, Canada, Ireland and the United States. A household in Sydney may have to spend as much as 50 per cent of its income on housing. (tpr: according to experts this is not going to get better either, with a shortage of properties throughout the country prices and rents will begin to escalate)
By contrast, American cities dominated the first few hundred places on the affordable housing index.
There, housing could cost around 20 per cent of household income.
Detroit, Michigan and South Bend, Indiana are where the cheapest housing options are available to home buyers.
Another Michigan town, Flint, came in 6th spot. Flint is (in)famous as the setting for Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger and Me, about how the closure of the GM automotive plant there had decimated the city to the tune of 30,000 jobs.
The Demographia study examines the relationship between household incomes and house prices, in determining a city’s affordability.