Pacific-led housing push highlights big home ownership gap

Pacific communities in Aotearoa New Zealand continue to face some of the lowest home ownership rates and the highest housing stress.

This has prompted calls for more support for Pacific-led housing solutions.

Speaking on Pacific Mornings, Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson pointed to systemic barriers blocking many Pacific families from home ownership.

“Lots of people have come to accept that it’s ordinary for whanau to be struggling with housing and I want to say that is not the case,” Davidson says.

“It is just political choices that have got us to where we are, where we treat housing as a way to build wealth first and foremost.

“What we need to see is housing as a human right, as a place for whanau to put down roots.”

Watch Marama Davidson's full interview below.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand says housing affordability is influenced by a range of factors, including housing supply, interest rates, incomes, and broader economic conditions.

According to the latest Census, around 64 per cent of Pacific renters spend 30 per cent of their income on housing.

Pacific families are twice as likely to rent, nearly 40 per cent live in overcrowded homes, almost half live in damp conditions, and 42 per cent live with visible mould.

The household home-ownership rate (owned or partly owned or held in a family trust) increased from 64.5 per cent in 2018 to 66.0 per cent in 2023. Photo/Supplied/Kainga Ora

On Wednesday, the Greens announced a housing campaign aiming to end homelessness, strengthen renters’ rights, and tackle the housing crisis, including a two per cent annual cap on rent increases.

“We need to invest in public housing because we can’t just rely on landlords alone to be able to provide our rental stock as well,” Davidson says.

She also backed her party’s Progressive Home Ownership Model, a rent-to-own scheme designed to help more Pacific people buy homes.

The model has been trialled in New Zealand through shared equity and rent-to-buy schemes, although evidence of its long-term impact at scale remains limited.

Home ownership among Pacific people sits at 16.8 per cent, compared with around 66 per cent nationally.

Deputy Prime Minister and ACT Party leader David Seymour says his party’s reforms are helping lift home ownership rates.

Watch David Seymour's full interview below.

Speaking on Pacific Mornings, Seymour said his party will announce a new housing policy later this year.

He points to the government’s efforts to cut red tape around resource management, saying builders have identified long waits for resource consents as a major barrier.

“Now we’re replacing the resource management law and we’re going to make it much faster, simpler and easier which really helps,” Seymour says.

“We're also putting money into funding infrastructure so that the pipes and the roads and the things that connect the houses together and connect them to jobs and schools and opportunities so that the central government can fund that better.

“So our approach is, how do you actually make it easier to get homes built and connect them together with infrastructure? That is how you get prices down so people can afford more.”

Data on the impact of ACT’s proposed reforms is not yet available, and home ownership rates remain significantly lower among Pacific communities.