OPINION New Zealand has a long history of being slow to face up to the plight of its renters.

The tipping point is normally when the population of renters in an inner city grows to exceed the number of homeowners there: as it did in the 1920s, the 1930s, late 1960s and early 1970s.

Pass this threshold, and you start seeing articles like these from the 1974 edition of Salient (Victoria University’s student newspaper) where the author says “it is difficult to describe how unpleasant the living conditions are”, she then goes on to do a pretty good job of describing them:

“The bedroom carpet has rotted away with mould. Woodlice crawl through the house. The ceilings are mouldy. The mother is Indian, so it is more difficult for the family to find a decent flat at a rent they can afford.”

Otago University public health research fellow Elinor Chisholm has filled a journal article with examples like these under the title The way to end housing problems: tenant protest in New Zealand in the 1970s, although when I read it I wasn’t sure what protests she was talking about. That’s partly the point. These protests have happened before, and have largely been forgotten.

But it could happen again, especially in an interconnected world where a rental protest in Spain or Germany is only one TikTok swipe away.

We are seeing anger right across the globe, much of it linked to various housing shortages. Dublin, for example, has the distinction of being one of the lowest-rise cities in Europe. Surprise, surprise, it seems to have the continent’s worst housing crisis too.

Many homeowners, or aspiring homeowners, might not see why they should want the rental situation in New Zealand to improve.

But if you can create improvements, you will often see benefits spill over into other areas, if only because it makes it easier for people to rent if the housing market turns hot.

This doesn’t quite work the other way around though, and you only have to look to the housing situation in Spain to see why.

Over several decades the Spanish Government put through many financial incentives to get people into homeownership, or encourage the construction of more owner-occupied dwellings. Unfortunately there weren’t any accompanying policies to encourage people to build more rental housing.

It almost completely reversed a situation earlier last century when there had been an equal supply of public and private rental housing in Spain. As the number of renters in Spain grew, partly because homeowner subsidies were pulled back, but also because more people wanted to live in city centres, there was not enough rental supply to soak up the extra demand.

There is a tendency in New Zealand to think we are different, and that a similar cultural switch from owning to renting could not happen here – especially because homeownership is a desire drilled into everyone from birth.

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Yet you only have to look across the Tasman to see a similar situation taking shape, where one in two households in the inner ring of Australia’s capital cities is now renting.

The good news is that New Zealand seems to have stumbled onto part of the solution: more apartments, townhouses and attached dwellings – because these are more likely to be rented out.

In Auckland, where these types of dwellings are the main types being built, and planning rules have been relaxed through the Unitary Plan, increases in the rental price index have lagged behind inflation.

Same too in Canterbury, where Christchurch has become a bit of a case study for what happens when you remove some resource management rules and build more houses.

Unfortunately that is not the situation in the Wellington region, where building consents in Wellington City have lagged behind the rest of the country, and rental inflation has been outrunning general inflation for a large part of the pandemic.

And to be fair, it is not the entire situation in Auckland either. The largest amount of building in Auckland seems to be taking place either right smack-bang in the city centre, or more than 10 kilometres beyond, thanks to character overlays and other rules that make it harder for people to build high quality apartment buildings and townhouses in inner city areas.

A PriceWaterhouseCoopers report notes the new national policy statement on urban development – which will remove these protections – will redistribute wealth from landlords to renters and first homebuyers, by reducing the cycle of reverse wealth redistribution where young renters and first homeowners pay higher rents and house prices than they need to, and line the pockets of existing owners.

It is not hard to see why the current neighbours would not be fans of this role reversal, but given the crisis that we are in, and the chance that it could get even worse, maybe it is time for everyone to look beyond what they fear might go up next door