Challenges to achieving sustainability in social housing construction in New Zealand
Author: Oleg Nikitin
Supervisors: Lorraine Skelton Yury Zhukov
15 April 2025
Nikitin, O. (2025). Challenges to achieving sustainability in social housing construction in New Zealand [Master's thesis, Auckland International Campus, Otago Polytechnic]. Research Bank. https://doi.org/10.34074/thes.6825
Abstract
The housing crisis resulting in a lack of affordable housing has become an urgent problem that New Zealand faces due to various socio-economic and historical-political reasons. Social housing is one of the ways to address this problem and currently the country is experiencing a significant increase in the need for affordable and quality social housing. Given the growing need for social housing, it is vital to understand what actions need to be taken and by whom to balance the various aspects of sustainability of the social housing sector. This is more important as housing providers face various interrelated challenges, including financial, political, social, and institutional factors that significantly influence their activities. This paper aimed to identify the factors influencing the achievement of sustainability and, where possible, make recommendations to the management of housing providers and the government on how to overcome the emerging challenges. The results of this study reflected the practical experience of housing providers and showed that achieving true sustainability in this sector is possible only with a radical transformation of the existing relations. The recommendations developed in this paper propose that the state take on the function of a social customer, determining the need, parameters, and characteristics of social housing, while housing providers are proposed to become exclusively project operators, ensuring their economic efficiency. This study should become an occasion to think about the role and importance of social housing for society and encourage the government to change the established practice of manipulating housing policy to please political ambitions, putting social and environmental aspects at the forefront, i.e., to do what any government must do.
Keywords
social housing, social housing providers, sustainable construction, affordable housing, government policy, New Zealand
License
This thesis is publicly available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
