Yay! NZ is leading the world in ...

 

... can you guess? *

Discussion here.

(And note that: the price-to-rent percentage represents 0% change in 2000 from 2000 prices, and (for NZ) a whopping 280% change in ratio from 2000 prices. Note that over the long run (centuries) the real cost (inflation adjusted) of housing should remain relatively unchanged, as should this ratio. So these price increases are unsustainable.)

But ... but (I hear some of you say), this doesn't measure housing affordability per se. Just the rent-to-price ratio. True. But we also "lead" in the all-important price-to-income ratio (which historically has been around three, and here in NZ is now over 10!) and in our Housing Bubble ranking (see below). 

And it does demonstrate the disastrous trend in unaffordability over the last two decades -- two decades of excessive monetary pumping and ever increasing restrictions on building and developing. A trend that is so much worse in this place. A trend that has (in David Stockman's words) "capriciously conferred financialised prosperity on selective pockets of ... society." An ever-accelerating trend that every government here has only made even worse -- and no government has bothered to arrest. 

And with all this in mind, and since it's election time, let me remind you that the goddamned Blue Team (Luxon, Seymour, and Bishop) have disgracefully squelched, on a whim, the only thing in living memory, however imperfect, that would do anything at all to improve it.

Arseholes.

* Have you guessed yet? Next question: whom (and what) do you blame?