A safe, warm and affordable home for everyone

The Green Party will ensure everyone has access to a safe, warm and affordable place to call home.

We all need somewhere to call home – a place to rest, to share with our loved ones, to make a life, or watch our kids grow up.

Access to a warm, safe home is a human right. But successive governments have allowed housing to become a get rich scheme for a lucky few, and a source of misery and expense for hundreds of thousands of others.

Far too many families are forced to pay through-the-roof to rent cold, damp, and unhealthy homes, and a generation has been locked out of ever owning their own home. This didn’t happen by accident; it is the consequence of decisions made by successive governments.

Nothing is more important than a warm, safe, affordable home, with food on the table, and the people we love. The Green Party is the only party with a credible plan to make it happen for everyone.

We will fix housing to uphold renters’ rights, and build thousands more warm, dry, affordable homes in the places people want to live.

The time is now to put the interests of people before those of investment landlords, and build the high-quality, warm, affordable homes we need.

Our plan

  • Halt the rise in rents by providing that annual rent increases cannot be more than 3 percent, and link rents in a new tenancy to what previous tenants paid.
  • Improve Healthy Homes Standards by extending temperature requirements to bedrooms, narrowing exemptions, and creating a rental warrant of fitness.
  • Significantly scale up the Kāinga Ora building programme and require Kāinga Ora to implement a partnership approach with iwi and hapū for development of housing in their rohe.
  • Expand MAIHI and Whai Kāinga, Whai Oranga to resource Māori-led housing solutions that meet the needs of Māori communities, including improving the financing options for development of papakāinga on Māori land.
  • Provide supported housing for people with complex needs who are experiencing homelessness, with quick pathways to a long-term home.
  • Expand government support for first home buyers through shared equity and progressive home ownership schemes, and low-interest Government-backed loans.
  • Provide government underwrites of community housing developments that provide long-term affordable rental and shared ownership housing.
  • Provide Government-backed mortgage refinancing for people who bought their first home in the past four years, and are at risk of hardship due to interest rate increases.

You can find our full manifesto here.