REINZ reports 6,008 sales in November, up 17% from year ago and 20% from October; New record median price of NZ$367,500

.aha ha de haaaaaaaa !. Good one ...

.. .. time to dust off me old Ollie Newland books ? ......

.. Ollie 1 : Bernard 0

Watch how long your deluded optimism lasts this time, as europe falls and world demand drops off a cliff. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! goes another bubble!  or is it POOOOOOOOOP?

For nearly 20 years, Mr Dunne has taken a public position opposed to tobacco control. In 1987, while an Undersecretary of Health in the Labour Government, he was reported as describing those who wanted a ban on tobacco advertising as ‘elitist zealots’.1 Since he left the Labour Party in 1994, he has consistently voted against tobacco control initiatives.

http://journal.nzma.org.nz/journal/118-1226/1765/

Now he's the property investors bitch.

This is true masochism.

Read "Driving Productivity and Growth in the UK Economy", McKinsey Institute, 1998, to learn what persisting over the long term with inflated urban land prices, does to an economy.

Also read "Three Cheers for Urban Sprawl" by Martin Durkin.

http://www.martindurkin.com/blogs/three-cheers-urban-sprawl

"....As a result of State planning restrictions, Britons are stuffed into towns and cities like battery-farmed chickens.  We are among the most densely packed people in the world.......

"......to make matters much worse for the Brits, our urban areas constitute a mere 9 percent of total land use.  That’s right - 90 percent of the people crammed into 9 percent of Britain.  Compare that to the 13 percent of land devoted to ‘Green Belt’........

".......The planning system, by limiting the amount of land available to build on, has created an artificial shortage of living space, forcing up the prices of houses and flats to such astronomical heights that many young couples can only dream of affording one.  The less affluent dare not get a job for fear of losing housing benefit.  There are families in London where the children sleep three and four to a room – a tiny room in a dingy flat.  Children who have outgrown their cots are forced to stay in them, sleeping with their legs bent (I have direct knowledge of such cases).  It is impossible to document the sheer bloody misery caused by the planning system - countless examples of diminished lives.  Even well paid professional couples in London now struggle to afford dark, crumbling Victorian houses, in rough parts of town.  Houses built for costermongers and chimney sweeps in the late 19^th Century. But it goes far beyond property prices. Soaring urban land values have a knock-on effect, raising the cost of everything, from cinema tickets to shoes.  The land and property shortage (artificially created remember) has pushed all prices up, reducing our quality of lives in a myriad of unseen ways.  Meanwhile, the few remaining patches of green in our towns and cities are fast shrinking and disappearing. Gardens are designated ‘brown-field’ sites to allow more flats and houses to be built.  Houses are horribly divided into tiny disfigured flats.  School fields, parks and squares are shrinking and disappearing at an alarming rate, extra blocks of flats spring up everywhere, like weeds in the cracks.  The shocking effect of Green Belts has been to empty our urban areas of green spaces, and yet, as State planners know fine well, these are the most cherished bits of green in Britain, giving far more people, far more pleasure than ‘the countryside’ (to which so few of us go).  Worryingly, the London Planning Advisory Committee has decided that London has room for 570,000 extra homes.......

"..........As the private housing market was strangled, it was decided that instead the State would build inner-city accommodation for the masses.  They were to be confined to urban areas, forced to live in high densities in high-rise blocks.  Rather than chose their own home in a free market, ordinary people had to apply to the State to be housed and would be allocated one (a very nasty State produced home).  By the 1970s around a third of the British population lived in State housing..........."

In the post-oil post-affordable-energy world, "wealth CONSUMING" jobs definitely have to be the FIRST to go. It makes me laugh that the affordable energy doomsayers assume that all the suburban factories and malls will close, but bureaucracies in high rise buildings will remain untouched by layoffs, and happy apartment dwellers will walk to their offices to keep shuffling paper as normal.

Question: where does the money that pays their wages come from?

Good luck, unemployed mass density apartment dwellers in the collapsed post-affordable resource economy, with growing your own food to eat, burning wood for heat and cooking, recycling, composting, keeping hens, generating your own sustainable power, etc etc etc.

Sectors of property markets can and do have their own bubbles and crashes.

Inner city living was partly "allowed" by councils in Akl and Wgtn in the FIRST place, to rescue property investors from the consequences of a serious over-investment bubble in CBD building construction.

NZ has a ridiculous proportion of tall buildings already for a population of 4 million. Urban economies CREATE wealth in factories and primary industries located mostly in suburban areas. The CBD is where wealth is churned and consumed. Disproportionately thriving CBD's are often one element in an economy that is hopelessly imbalanced re wealth creation and wealth consumption, existing on offshore borrowings.

If this part of the economy is the LAST to crash, it bodes ill for the chances of any recovery at all. The productive, "tradables" sector was the first to go; it actually has to be the first to "come back" if we are really going to recover rather than have speculatively-driven dead cat bounces in our economy - driven by more borrowed money of course.

But if those properties were allowed to be subdivided..........?

HMMMMMMMM....................

Rising steel prices (and concrete) will make wood more competitive of course. What's not to like about wood? It sequesters CO2, whereas concrete is responsible for considerable new emissions.

Patrick Troy, in "The Perils of Urban Consolidation" (1996) points out that a lot of the planned "densification" going on actually creates more emissions in concrete production and construction processes, than it allegedly saves via reducing the amount of sprawled living in wooden houses. The amount saved by "reducing urban sprawl" is in any case far from clear, but is obviously minimal, in contrast to the claims of advocates. Whereas the CO2 from concrete is clearly measurable.

Yes, I really mean governments in the decadent phase of democracy. A wise Czar would probably do a better job. But so few Czars are wise and kind..........sadly. I also very much doubt that POST-democracy tyrannies are going to be BETTER..........