Affordability in New Zealand

Housing affordability is a perennially hot topic in New Zealand and a complex one. In our best effort to tease out the issue's main components and contribute to the public discussion, we created Affordability in New Zealand, an educational and interactive map of housing affordability in various regions of New Zealand.

You and your partner, if you have one, just got a job in Auckland, say. Now where to live? The affordability map colour codes Auckland's rental areas by their affordability to you.

Here affordability is based on median market rents, your commute costs, and your answers to various questions. After choosing your parameters, you can then hover over any area to bring up a detailed cost breakdown for that area.

Using the map, the public can explore different scenarios and quickly appreciate the multifactorial nature of housing affordability, that it is not simply about rent-to-income ratios. Moreover, the map is open-source and available on Github so that others can inspect our work and extend it to other cities of the world.

Try it!