Why can't our kids afford to buy a small home? Or even a trolley full of groceries, for that matter.
There's someone making gangs of money, by design. And it ain't the people who work for a living.
What are charming but manipulative real estate story. In 1960 a 15 year-old boy and a 17 year-old girl spent their pocket money to buy a small section of land on Waiheke island that is now worth well over a million dollars.
100 pounds in those days amounts to a measly $6,000 New Zealand dollars now.
That would buy them just 1/200th of that property today, not the whole property.
It's a heartwarming story and it's an indictment of our system.
Young people (and even older people) today can’t afford housing.
Housing is a now an investment asset for a landlord (with taxpayer-subsidized mortgage interest thanks to the current government), not a roof over a family’s head.
We have let the pursuit of growth and profits rule over everything: housing, education, public safety, healthcare. To 40 years of governments (and especially to this current but hopefully temporary one) profits matter, people don't.
It reminds me of those pictures you see of modern India: with thousands of people still crowding railway car built by the British in the 1940s. So backward, right?
No, not exactly. There’s a backstory there, and in every colony and pillaged place from Haiti to the Congo to India.
