One of my many hobbies on this site is to collect together to works of Peter Townsend, one of the rebuild’s greatest cheerleaders, and the head of the Employers Chamber of Commerce. Mostly they are about how the rebuild is “about to crank up” or that “you can smell the money”. This is a new favourite:
Everyone I talk to that is repairing their house or rebuilding their house is putting more capital in than the insurance company, because they’re putting betterment in. So you have $200,000 worth of damage to your house you’re going to put a new kitchen in, you’re going to put a new bathroom in for another $40,000-$50,000 and do above and beyond what the like-for-like replacement of your insurance policy will allow you to do.
Everyone Townsend talks to is putting in a new kitchen; whereas everyone I talk to on the streets of Ilam is worried about their landlord putting rent up, about the power bills for winter, about whether Housing New Zealand is going to kick them out. This really is a tale of two cities: the one where the quakes were a minor inconvenience resulting in a new master bedroom with an ensuite, and the one where rent has gone up 40% in the last year but there is still a queue of 50 lining up to lease it.
Rebuilding Christchurch 
I noticed two things about the Pete Townsend Article. The stupid title of the article saying extra spending was a ‘Blowout’. People choosing to upgrade their city when it is efficient to do so is not a blowout, its building back better. It’s called investment. I do worry about our sub-editors. Second is that quite a lot of this money is probably not ‘adding value’ but actually private top ups from people and investors as so much was undervalued by their insurance. Which is fine, but its not the same thing.