New Zealanders will live in more high-rise blocks like vertical villages in the next two decades because of the sheer impossibility of getting through grid-locked city traffic systems.
We will also demand disposable 'glorified shanty' housing, built for environmental sustainability and able to be remodelled, extended and recycled as needs change.
This new futuristic modular housing will appear more flimsy than today's houses but it will also use less energy, be cheaper to build and allow owners to escape the mortgage noose.
Although the housing might be 'characterless', often on leasehold land and maintenance free, owners will not have all their wealth tied up in property.
These are just some of the findings of a new report out yesterday which examines the shape of housing in 2030.
An independent association, Building Research, and the Government's Centre for Housing Research commissioned the report from Susan Bates of Scion - a Crown research institute formerly called Forest Research - and Chris Kane of the Building Research Association.
They found that 70 per cent of the housing stock in 2030 already exists but were keen to find out about the 30 per cent which has not been built.
They outlined five scenarios to 'stretch our imaginations' about housing and said this would give a vision of the future.
Falling global oil production and rising fuel and transport costs would force more of us into city centres in the next two decades. A shortage of land to expand motorways and policies like Auckland's to encourage more high-rise apartment blocks would mean more people would live in 'vertical villages'.
Poorer people would move further out into the suburbs while the wealthy would increasingly regard inner-city apartment life as an option.
Those blocks would have more communal activities and their communities would become well integrated. The poor would increasingly live in trailer parks because these would be the only affordable housing for them.
Apartment life offered more freedom from commuting and onerous home maintenance, but the trade-off would be less physical space for people. The report asked if people would accept the sacrifice.
The new style of recyclable, temporary housing predicted would have a use-by date, be a series of cubes joined together and able to be removed or added to as residents' lives changed.
Older people would criticise this housing as 'tinny' but its advocates would value its design, low cost, orientation towards the sun, low energy use, good layout and flexibility.
The report also predicted more gated communities, saying the US had six million, Britain at least 1000 and South Africa an increasing number.
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