Census suggests most housing development has occurred in the wealthier parts of Auckland, while high growth poorer districts have been neglected

Ruapehu district lost 57 dwellings between censuses? Bush fires or something else?

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Ohakune river overflow. Major flooding in 2013, and a few incidents since then.

So if Canterbury increased its population by 11.2% but only grew dwellings by 6.9% according to your logic, its grossly undersupplied with housing? Because I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who claims that there is a housing shortage in Christchurch and surrounding areas.

Anecdotally I find these results quite interesting.

Based in New Plymouth, our population has clearly increased - you can tell by the traffic alone.
However employment opportunities are decreasing, so I am seeing many working age people leaving town (often with families in tow).

It would be good to see this analysis factoring in age of the population as well.

In my opinion a dwelling made up of 2 Adults and 4 children, paints a completely different picture to a dwelling made up of 6 working age Adults, which again is completely different to a dwelling with 6 retirees.

I raise this as I wonder how "dwellings" is measured given the proliferation of retirement/lifestyle villages. i.e. an assisted living/hospital type care facility with 30-40 people in a building v the small independent units for 1-2 residents, or is the entire village just counted as 1 dwelling.

so we increased the population by 10.8% in five years and wonder why we have capacity and infrastructure problems.
as homer would say DUH

I'm surprised there's no mention of Auckland's 40,000 unoccupied homes most of which are likely to be in the center of our city. Looking at the latest census data we really, really need an Empty Homes Tax.
Auckland is a good example for why we need it, since wage earners can't afford a home. Having at least 40,000 unoccupied private dwellings is just insane. Vancouver only had officially 8,500 unoccupied private dwellings and yet they brought in an Empty Homes tax which so far is collecting huge amounts of revenue for them, up to $38 million in their first year! Which is used to build new affordable homes. NZ Census link: http://statsnz.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=97e2e97c…

Quelle surprise:

developers concentrate their activities on wealthier suburbs where their margins will be greater

ECON101 in action, perhaps?

The invisible hand of the market appears to favour the wealthy.

Of course. This is where the overseas cash went large for school zones. No tax paying local would pay $4m for a house that historically struggled to push $2m.

Quite an achievement:

1. Auckland stock up 6.5% since 2013 and residential sales down 26.47% (29,645 v 21,796)
2. Rodney stock up 12.2% since 2013 and sales down 20 (1724 v 1704)

Not because people cannot afford stuff though, eh....

The wealthy get new homes because they can afford them. The poor don't get new homes because they can't afford them. When a taxpayer sponsored breeding programme creates too many poor people & not enough wealthy people, this outcome was assured 50 years ago. Discourage the people with no means of support themselves to not have babies is the only answer. Everything else is noise. Welfare is not only destroying those people it locks into welfare by continuing the poverty cycle into generations, but will eventually sink the Good Ship NZ Inc at some point if it continues. As it will all welfare states around the planet. The best way to get kids out of poverty Jacinda is to not encourage them with welfare.

One more reason to not to leave urban development in solely private hands, private developers will develop where they'd expect higher returns, which is not necessarily where it is needed the most and as the data shows it hasn't been where there's been higher demand.

Greg- a very interesting article. But surely in Auckland, with one new house having been added for every 1.8 additional people, surely that is more than keeping up with population growth, given approx 2 people per household, and more in Auckland. Or have I got this wrong somehow?

Well of course this was going to happen .

Would a developer build a house in Mangere or Greenhithe , given than the cost of construction per m2 is identical , but the sale prices are circa $750k in Mangere and circa $1,5 to $2,0 million in Greenhithe .

Not to mention how hard it is to sell in lower income areas to people with no money , and the theft and other such nonsense from the site during construction .