The housing ideas we could and should learn from

Election campaigns are fertile ground for housing plans.

This year, voters are being offered a familiar range of options: planning reform, public housing construction, stronger tenant protections, changes to tax settings, support for first-home buyers. They all have different views about why housing has become so unaffordable and who should bear the costs of fixing it.

Beyond the battle over policies lies a more enduring question: how do new housing ideas gain traction?

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Across New Zealand, communities and organisations are already experimenting with different ways of making housing more affordable. Community housing providers are trying new delivery models. Māori communities are leading diverse housing initiatives, using ancestral whenua (lands) for small scale developments, through to Iwi-Crown partnerships, such as Toitu Tairawhiti and Ka Uruora, and iwi-backed mortgage lending for papakāinga, as seen through Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei’s recent collaboration with BNZ.

Community land trusts, co-housing projects, shared-equity schemes and build-to-rent developments are exploring different ways of financing, owning and governing housing. Such innovations are exemplified through the work of the Housing Foundation, Tāmaki Regeneration, Kāinga Ora, and an increasing number of banks supporting these programmes.

Most of these initiatives don’t make headlines. Fewer still make it into election debates.

Instead of helping such promising ideas spread, recent Government decisions have undermined several initiatives created to support them.

The Whai Kāinga Whai Oranga fund, which backed Iwi-Crown housing partnerships, was discontinued in May 2025 to be replaced by a contestable ‘Flexible Fund’.

The Progressive Homeownership Fund, which offered interest-free loans that facilitated rent-to-buy, shared ownership and leasehold schemes, was closed in June 2024, and stopped accepting applications from providers. Emerging evidence suggests these programmes supported alternative models of housing that made housing more affordable and improved housing security.

New Zealand has no shortage of housing ideas. Nor is it lacking evidence. We know a great deal about the drivers of housing affordability. We know planning systems matter. Infrastructure matters. Finance matters. Public housing matters. Much of the political disagreement concerns priorities, trade-offs and values rather than lack of knowledge.

Election campaigns usually focus on targets, funding commitments and legislative reform. Those debates matter because they shape the conditions under which housing is built and accessed.

Less visible are the institutions and processes that determine whether promising ideas spread beyond their place of origin.

How does a promising housing project get recognised beyond its immediate context? How are lessons carried between regions, agencies and housing providers? How does a local experiment become something larger?

These questions might sound secondary when housing affordability remains so pressing, but they can be deeply consequential.

New Zealand’s housing history is full of ideas that began on the margins before becoming widely accepted.

When the first Labour government began building state houses in the 1930s, the idea that government should directly provide high-quality homes was controversial. State houses were criticised for being ‘luxury’ homes for ordinary people. Today, they are regarded as a normal part of New Zealand’s housing system. Community housing providers, now an established part of the landscape, emerged from much smaller beginnings. Build-to-rent housing is, similarly, in the process of being normalised, with 2552 units built, 1443 under construction and 4367 in the development pipeline.

Many innovations that seem entirely normal today started as experiments whose potential was far from obvious at the time.

Valuable lessons are generated every year through community-led projects, local initiatives and alternative housing models. Too often those lessons remain local.

This is not an argument for replacing large-scale reform. Questions about planning rules, infrastructure funding, taxation, public housing and renters’ rights remain central to the housing crisis. They deserve serious political debate.

Governments should also invest more deliberately in learning from experiments in building more affordable, liveable homes. That might mean stronger support for demonstration projects, better evaluation frameworks, or more effective ways of sharing knowledge between organisations and regions.

The election debate is understandably dominated by competing blueprints. Voters deserve to know what each party intends to do.

But housing systems depend on more than manifestos and masterplans. The next breakthrough in housing affordability may already exist. Smaller experiments with housing plans can reveal new possibilities and challenge established assumptions.

Somewhere in New Zealand right now, a community land trust, papakāinga development or shared-equity scheme may be solving a problem that has frustrated policymakers for decades.

Part of our housing challenge is ensuring that when good ideas emerge, we recognise them, learn from them, and harness them for our collective good.