This week the price of an average house in Auckland reached the $800,000 mark.  The housing problem must be solved and small children might just have the answers to achieve this.

Well, at least the questions. Anyone who has ever spent time with a 3-year-old can quickly tire of the question, “Why?” Kids are often relentless in their quest to explain why things are the way they are.  “Because I said so” just doesn’t seem to cut it. 

But adults should learn from children’s curious minds. To find solutions for problems, such as rapidly rising property prices, or that too many children live in crowded, damp, cold, mouldy houses, the question “why” should be asked, over and over, even if it gets annoying. 

Poorer households spend a much greater proportion of their income on housing, and this is likely exacerbated by these absurdly accelerating house prices. The property price problem, and the poor quality housing problem, are very likely linked.  A 2013 BRANZ report found that 87% of households with incomes below $20,000 needed immediate repairs to their homes. 

Accomplished researcher Philippa Howden-Chapman has spent her career quantifying the size of the housing and poverty problem and its flow-on effects on health problems and educational achievement.  

One estimate cited in a 2013 paper by Howden-Chapman is that improving housing conditions would reduce rheumatic fever by two thirds. She also outlines intervention studies showing that lifting housing standards improves these outcomes.

But before solutions are considered, policy makers must keep digging away with that childlike question, why. Howden-Chapman answers the first why, acknowledging “the effects of the Auckland housing shortage”. But why is there a shortage?

One answer is excessive demand. Those dreaming of the quarter acre should, according to some, settle for less. And speculators know that if they sit on a house, the price will go up without them having to lift a finger to improve the quality and real value of the house. If policy makers intervene at this point, it is to curb demand. But more reasons need to be sought.  

Why do the prices keep going up? As outlined in our work on housing affordability, there is too much demand relative to supply. Why? Artificial restrictions on building up, and out. The Initiative has successfully shifted the debate here. This is a supply problem. 

And the Initiative’s next series of research will ask why local councils are restricting land supply. The incentives for development are clearly not right. The question is why.     

To find solutions to these problems, it is essential to keep asking why.