David Hanna is a man who thinks long and hard about the ethics of his small property investments. When David bought his first rental property in the 1990s to supplement his retirement, the government was making noises that NZ Super wouldn’t be around when he retired.
“We were responding to the signals in the market that we had to save long-term,” says David.
The family bought an investment property in Wellington, followed later by a second one in Featherston. Over the years, however, David, whose day job is director of Wesley Community Action, began to dwell on the ethics of his property investing.
The question was more than just treating his tenants well. He does that, and is considering sharing some of the capital gain with one, to help him into his first home.
“It’s still, in the wider scheme of things, unethical,” says David. “I don’t want to claim that doing something like that somehow negates the iniquity and the injustice of the system which I’m benefiting from.”
The issue for David is that being ethical at the micro-level doesn’t make the wider picture ethical.
“You can be ethical as an individual landowner. You
