State housing in New Zealand

Unlike public housing in many other countries, much of the New Zealand state housing of the 20th century was in the form of detached houses similar to the typical Kiwi house. Aerial photograph of a 1947 development in Oranga, Auckland.

State housing is a system of public housing in New Zealand, offering low-cost rental housing to residents on low to moderate incomes. Some 69,000 state houses are managed by Kāinga Ora – Homes and Communities,[1] most of which are owned by the Crown. In excess of 31,000 former state houses exist,[2] which are now privately owned after large-scale sell-offs during recent decades. Since 2014, state housing has been part of a wider social housing system, which also includes privately owned low-cost housing.

An archetypal 1930s and 1940s state house is a detached two- or three-bedroom cottage-style house, with weatherboard or brick veneer cladding, a steep hipped tile roof, and multi-paned timber casement windows.[3] Thousands of these houses were built across New Zealand as state housing, and as private housing after World War II, when the Government started selling their drawings and plans in an attempt to hasten housing construction.[4][5] These houses, also known as "ex-state houses" to distinguish them from modern state housing, have a reputation of being well-built and are very sought after by real estate buyers, especially after the leaky homes crisis of the 1990s and 2000s hit buyer confidence in newer stock.[6]

  1. ^ "About us". Housing New Zealand Corporation. Retrieved 4 July 2013.
  2. ^ Schrader, Ben (16 November 2012). "100,000th state house – State loans and state houses – Housing and Government". Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Retrieved 5 July 2013.
  3. ^ "Build them and they will come". The New Zealand Herald. 12 April 2014. Retrieved 14 November 2014.
  4. ^ "Private housing in the 1940s–60s". Building Research Association of New Zealand. Retrieved 6 July 2013.
  5. ^ "FAQs – Ex-state houses". Housing New Zealand Corporation. Retrieved 6 July 2013.
  6. ^ "There's gold in ex-state homes". The New Zealand Herald. 23 November 2002. Retrieved 18 March 2013.