Source
https://www.branz.co.nz/pubs/research-reports/er81/ — original source (opens in a new tab; the file is not redistributed)
Summary
BRANZ External Research Report ER81 (Mitchell, Glaudel, Berghan & du Plessis, June 2023) is the full technical report on the enablers and barriers to developing affordable alternative housing tenures in New Zealand — tenures between renting and full fee-simple ownership, such as community land trusts, rental and limited-equity cooperatives, shared equity, rent-to-buy, co-ownership and hybrids. It combines housing-market need modelling, a rapid review of international and NZ literature, 30 semi-structured industry/sector interviews (under ethics approval NZEC 2022_27), and three NZ case studies, organised into a four-level “housing system” analysis (sociohistorical → governmental → industry/organisational → household). Its spine is that NZ housing affordability has deteriorated sharply (lower-quartile-unaffordable renters up 36% to 289,300, 2018→2022; rents +17% and house prices +50% against income +12% over three years), that alternative tenures could help, but that they are structurally uneconomic without subsidy and are held back by the absence of an enduring bipartisan national housing policy, an enabling legislative framework, and a sustained investment framework. It foregrounds Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Māori housing as the primary sociohistorical factor, including the institutional barriers facing multiply-owned whenua Māori and the kaupapakāinga (Māori cohousing) model. This is the full report behind OT_010.
Key claims
See key_claims frontmatter (7 detailed claims, cited to section).
Key thesis insights
- The four-level “housing system” framework is a transferable analytical lens for the thesis. ER81’s segmentation — sociohistorical, governmental, industry/organisational, household, with strong cross-level interdependencies (“failure to address all the identified barriers within certain levels will result in failure across a large proportion of the entire system”) — is a ready-made structure for the thesis’s argument about why alternative/community housing models struggle to scale in NZ. It reframes barriers as the absence of system building-blocks rather than discrete obstacles. OT_054
- “Subsidy is always required” is the hard economic finding. Across the international literature (Randolph, Crabtree, Gibb & Hayton, Benedict, Schmid, Pawson) and the NZ interviews, affordable alternative tenures cannot be delivered at sub-market cost without below-market land and/or long-term patient capital. The corollary — that the level of subsidy rises as targeted household income falls (Randolph’s continuum, Fig 4.1) — is directly useful for any thesis claim about the economics of community/cohousing affordability. OT_054
- Collective models are penalised by frameworks built for individualised ownership. Berghan (2021) on kaupapakāinga, and the broader cohousing discussion, show district plans, lending practices and legal/financial frameworks are not designed for collective tenure, so collective communities compromise or bear extra cost and stay “experimental”. This is the systemic explanation behind the lived frictions in the wiki’s NZ cohousing cases — earthsong_ranui (dual reticulation, collective land) and tui_community — and a strong evidentiary anchor for a analysis on cohousing/intentional-community viability. OT_054
- Te Tiriti / Māori housing is foundational, not peripheral. The report treats tangata whenua and the Treaty as the primary sociohistorical factor: the historical individualisation of land titles as a precondition for finance, institutional racism in lending, the legal complexity of building on multiply-owned whenua, and the by-Māori-for-Māori response (MAIHI / Te Kāhui Kāinga Ora; $730M Whai Kāinga Whai Oranga; Kāinga Whenua loan scheme and its low uptake). Essential grounding for any thesis engagement with Māori-community self-sufficiency and data / kāinga sovereignty. OT_054
- The “no peak body / no standardised documentation” gap. A repeatedly-cited NZ-specific barrier is the absence of a peak industry body to champion alternative tenures, standardise legal documents (CLT/cooperative agreements cost upward of $30,000 per transaction), and build financier/market/council knowledge — compounded by a fragmented sector of sub-scale providers. A concrete, citable institutional-design gap for the thesis. OT_054
- NZ enabling exceptions are local. Queenstown Lakes District Council (voluntary inclusionary housing supporting its community housing trust) and Christchurch City Council (supportive of providers; Peterborough Housing Cooperative) are cited as the rare local-government enablers — useful concrete NZ cases for the thesis, alongside the wiki’s existing community cases. OT_054
Research targets
Research gaps
- The three ER81 NZ case studies (Queenstown Lakes Community Housing Trust; Peterborough Housing Cooperative, Christchurch; iwi/land-trust case) sit in Appendices 4–6 and were characterised but not deep-read; the primary case detail remains in those appendices. No external document to retrieve.
Connections
Links to
Cases (2): Earthsong Eco-Neighbourhood · Tui Community
Sources (1): OT_010
Referenced by