Tiny South Island town inundated with interest
A tiny New Zealand town experiencing a unique problem has received an overwhelming amount of interest from overseas.
Kaitangata, a small settlement in the Clutha region, made headlines earlier this week after the town publicised that it had too many jobs, too many affordable houses and not enough people to fill them.
Since launching a drive to fill over 1000 job vacancies in the small town, which has a population of just 800 residents, immense interest has flooded in according to locals.
Bryan Cadogan, mayor of the Clutha District Council, said the attention from international media such as the BBC and the Guardian has spiked intense interest from around the world.
"All of a sudden in a blink of an eye it's gone right around the world and keeps reverberating around and around," he told NZ Newswire on Friday.
"My Facebook page has got over 5000 inquiries - it's just about impossible to answer each and every one of them.
"We've been caught on the hop - we've done too well."
Responses have flooded in from mostly the United Kingdom, central Europe and Australia.
But the mayor added that "some I can't read because they're in a different language".
"I just don't know how they came across the story."
Kaitangata is offering new residents affordably priced land and house packages in an attempt to attract city-dwellers to up sticks and start a new life in the Clutha region.
For just $230,000, families will be offered a house and land in the rural community south of Dunedin.
The average house price in New Zealand is now $577,829 - up 12.4 per cent over the past year.
A house in Kaitangata would require just a $40,000 deposit and a $200,000 loan, which would cost $340 a week a week over 20 years.
The Clutha District Council are even willing to offer a $5000 reimbursement for building consent, along with water and sewage connection.
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Third-generation Kaitangata resident Evan Dick is behind the town's recruitment drive, and says the region can bring back old Kiwi values and dreams.
“The housing crisis in New Zealand has made the Kiwi dream unattainable for many people, but in Kaitangata the Kiwi dream is still a reality,” Mr Dick told the Guardian.
“This is an old-fashioned community, we don’t lock our houses, we let kids run free. We have jobs, we have houses, but we don’t have people. We want to make this town vibrant again, we are waiting with open arms.”
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