Back in 2013 the government and the Auckland Council signed the Auckland Housing Accord. The accord was supposed to fix the Auckland housing market by building an extra 40,000 houses. A huge chunk of those houses were supposed to be "affordable" (for Auckland, which is still insanely unaffordable for real people). So how did it do? It turns out that like everything else National does, it was a dismal failure:
New figures show 98 free-market affordable homes have been built under the government's Auckland Housing Accord.
The chair of Auckland Council planning committee, councillor Chris Darby, has called the Accord a "dismal failure" in addressing affordability.
[...]
An analysis by Auckland Council sets out a detailed picture of what the government's SHA legislation has delivered.
Council data shows 3157 homes were completed in SHAs by the end of June, when monitoring ended.
So, it built less than 10% of the houses promised, and only a handful of "affordable" ones - most of which were one-bedroom shoebox apartments. Meanwhile, developers exploited the special housing areas to build unaffordable palazzos, or just flicked the land on to another landbanker without building anything. But then, the policy was never about building houses, let alone "affordable" ones - it was about generating headlines saying that that would happen. And on that level, National probably considers it a success. As for people in Auckland who still can't find a house to live in, national does not and never has cared about them.
