When my grandfather bought his first home in the United Kingdom, it cost him £2000.
At the time, that represented about six months’ salary for him (he was an engineer in the Royal Air Force). Today, a typical New Zealand home costs roughly 10 years’ salary.
We’ve grown so used to this trajectory of rising house prices that we’ve stopped seeing it for what it is: a systemic failure. As we navigate 2026, the recent RNZ report on The Great Property Breakup suggests the tide is finally turning.
New Zealanders are starting to look at shares and managed funds rather than banking everything on the quarter-acre section. This shift is vital, because for too long we haven’t been treating houses as shelter: we’ve been treating them as investments.
In my time overseeing one of the largest social housing portfolios in the country at the Dunedin City Council, and serving on the boards of Habitat for Humanity and Presbyterian Support Otago, I’ve seen the human cost of this obsession.
A home is the foundation of security and stability. When people have a warm, safe, dry place to call home, everything else improves: health outcomes rise, crime rates drop, and educational achievement soars.
Finland proved this with their ‘‘housing first’’ model. They didn’t treat housing as a reward for getting your life together; they treated it as the foundation building block to start building your life on.
Yet, in New Zealand, our policy settings have encouraged the opposite. It is utter madness that it is currently easier for someone to buy a second home — be it an investment property or a holiday home — than it is for a young family to buy their first.
We need a tax reset that reflects this reality. While there is often anxiety around a capital gains tax (CGT), we have to acknowledge that it is standard practice across the developed world.
Recent polling shows a majority of Kiwis now recognise the need for change, whether through a CGT or a wealth tax.
At Opportunity, we believe our land value tax (LVT) is the best of both solutions. It acts as both a wealth tax and a stabiliser for capital gains. By taxing the unimproved value of land, we make land-banking less profitable and incentivise high-density development.
It redirects capital out of unproductive real estate and back into the productive economy where it can actually grow New Zealand’s prosperity.
But tax is only half the battle. We also have to face the fact that we simply don’t know how to build cheaply any more.
The New Zealand way is often one designer and one builder creating one bespoke house for one person.
It is a 19th-century craft approach in a 21st-century world.
How much should a house cost? If an engagement ring is three months’ wages, perhaps a house should be three years? Or even one?
I don’t have a magic number, but I know that 7.3 times the median wage to build a house is severely unaffordable.
To fix this, we need to embrace scale and technology. We should be supporting offsite builders, streamlining processes for tiny homes and extensions, and providing government pre-approval for modern materials and methods.
We need to move away from bespoke and toward industrial scale without compromising on quality.
At Opportunity, we aren’t afraid to say the quiet part out loud: if we want housing to be affordable, prices have to drop.
We know this is a hard pill to swallow for those who bought at the peak of the market between 2020 and 2023 (which I did).
But the alternative — continuing to lock entire generations out of the Kiwi dream — is a price we can no longer afford to pay.
- David Bainbridge-Zafar is The Opportunity Party’s candidate for Dunedin in this year’s election.