Houses are expensive for many reasons. Resource consents and land supply are just two of them.

Add in construction materials, a shortage of qualified labour, financing costs, custom designs and consenting, and you can see the filo pastry of fees that leads to high housing costs.

And there is no silver bullet for the housing crisis, otherwise, it would have been fired a long time ago.

The problem is critical enough that Labour and National agreed this week, in a rare bi-partisan move, to introduce legislation sweeping away requirements for resource consents in most circumstances.

In his latest Stuff article, Sam Stubbs points out that change this dramatic, while needed, can have unforeseen consequences.

Read the full article here.