I think people have the causality the wrong way around, the immigration is to prop up the economy. Price is set at the margins and even relatively small amounts of new immigration keeps pushing the margins up. Any successful attempts to fix the housing market, by reducing immigration or any other means, will implode the Ponzi economy. Absolutely no politician is going going to do that - you might as well hand them a grenade at ask them to pull the pin.

It's my view that this implosion will happen, just later, with less control and with more devastation.

It's one of many factors. NZ already becoming unattractive partly due to expensive housing and somewhat low wages - immigration is slowing down. Also new law allows import of foreign-certified building materials so that might help too.

Thing with politicians is (depending on party) something like 90-100% of them are property owners and 30-70% are also property investors [0] so I just can't see how they would be willingly taking a haircut.

(Cherry on top - most of them couldn't even afford to buy their homes now on MP salary)

0: https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2021/12/the-full-lis...

I reject the idea that not having a backyard means that that property is shitty.

It's not my sentiment, but I do see it why it's a big part of culture and life here.

Flats tend to be horrible here. Townhouses are ok and are growing, albeit too slow and too far from public transport.

There was some news yesterday about new row of townhouses around Auckland being classified as rural and unable to receive mail (rural mailboxes must be grouped in one spot, not on each house).

The underappreciated problem with immigration is that it allows advanced economies to cover up issues that make raising kids difficult. A shrinking population crashes the housing market. A growing population powered by immigration rather than birth rate props up the housing market.

The irony being that (from a UK perspective at least), in the absence of immigration, childcare and senior care would be even less affordable than they are.

Somebody has to do this work: it's essential, as well as hard, unglamorous and badly paid, and societies must take their pick from:

- Family members, almost always women, who have to give up paid work.

- Paid labour from less educated parts of their existing/indigenous population.

- Migrant labour, whether temporary or permanent.

The great mistake of Brexit is that the UK has now replaced temporary migrant labour (Poles and so on, who'd mostly come here in their early/mid 20s, stay for ten/fifteen years and then go home to raise families and be closer to their elders) with permanent migrants from much poorer countries who won't want to go back if they can at all avoid it.