In the early 2000s, some reckoned that house prices were radically increasing or escalating because some people were engaged in what we called then "flipping properties"—that is, buying them quickly, doing some minor improvements, and selling them on. But the crisis we have today is far worse. No one is really even pretending to improve properties that they're sitting on any more, or too much. The crisis now is one more so of affording—that is, the hoarding of wealth and more capital gains in the hands of a few while more and more New Zealanders, those 1.4 million New Zealanders, who rent struggle to pay that rent, let alone get into a first home. 