Campaign will boost house prices –Depress Competitive Edge.

Napier industrialist Ken Evans is cautioning Come-to-Live in Hawkes Bay promoters that they run the risk of creating the very problems that their target market of Auckland residents are fleeing to escape. This is a property prices spiral along with associated pressure on education and health services.

Mr Evans warns that Napier especially is one of the nation’s leading repositories of engineering and technical skills and that this was sustained by affordable housing and the presence of high grade education along with health care.

“Competition for housing will make it hard for the Hawkes Bay productive sector to attract the skilled people that industry requires.”

He warned that this kind of civic boosting in New Zealand in the past had become effectively taken over by real estate interests.The result had been pressure on the existing infrastructure and also property inflation which in turn pushed house prices beyond the grasp of younger people needed by the area’s industry.

He noted also that this kind of property pressure meant that speculators entered the picture putting pressure on industrial sites as they sought to convert them into residential subdivisions.

Contrary to an impression being deliberately nurtured in Auckland, he said, Napier was not a dormitory city or a retirement haven.

The New Zealand pattern he noted was for wealth to be generated in the provinces such as Hawkes Bay and spent in places like Auckland and Wellington.

The productive capacity of Hawkes Bay should not be damaged by a self-created property boom and accompanying residential shortage, warned Mr Evans.

All this would have the effect of the region finding it increasingly harder to attract the skilled people required to underpin the local productive economy.  He warned also that there had been early signs of district utilities failing to maintain required standards through failure to put in place adequate safeguards to cope with increased land-use.

It was often ignored he said that in industries such as process engineering that Hawkes Bay was in direct competition with Australia, not to mention Asia.

Attracting skilled employees through affordable housing remains a vital competitive edge in bringing them to Hawkes Bay, he said.

Mr Evans was reminded that in the Central District, notably Palmerston North, there had been several intense community – led such drives.  He said though that Palmerston North’s development campaigns had been launched in order to balance the city’s predominantly state and public sector employment in the form of Massey University, various research institutes, and training establishments such as the Teachers training College.

This imbalance did not exist in the mainly enterprise Hawkes Bay he said. Therefore it was essential that the area retained its competitive edge in the form of providing younger families with affordable housing. 

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Wednesday 28 September 2016