Larry Williams Drive

It looks like we are finally giving in and allowing shoebox apartments in New Zealand. This morning, Housing Minister Chris Bishop announced a whole raft of changes designed to make houses more affordable, and one of those changes is that he will remove any requirements for how big an apartment must be and how big the balcony must be. He reckons that back in 2015 when Auckland Council changed balcony size restrictions, it pushed the price of apartments up by $40,000- $70,000 each.Good call from him, it's about time we got on board with this.The very first property I put under my name was a tiny, tiny apartment. The bedrooms were so small, you could fit in a double bed with just enough space to walk around it with your shoulders touching the walls. I didn't have space for a dining table, so I took a bed out of a bedroom and put a dining table in and you could just get the chairs out from under the table without hitting the walls - it was that tiny. But it was what I wanted, which was a place I could afford to