Talk:New Zealand dream

Guide for contributors
This article has been structured with the audience in mind:


 * Most people visiting the page will be casual readers who just want a simple overview. A casual reader may lose interest if they have to read through volumes of technical information just to get to the basic facts. Please put the basic facts at the beginning of the article and the technical sections at the end.
 * Many of the readers will be from New Zealand (4 million population). However the english version of wikipedia has far more readers from countries like the USA and the UK, so comparisons with other English speaking countries may be of interest to them.
 * Please avoid insulting other countries by always making an effort to give a balanced view.

Badenoch 19:50, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

This Article
Is incredibly, incredibly weird. Lacks direction and purpose. Seriously, who wrote this thing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.236.211.103 (talk) 05:40, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Furthering the deletion debate
Strong delete The phrase has no significant level of use in New Zealand. Discussions on the correlation between types of residence and fertility rates may have their place, but the title of the article is tangential to this. The article also has a political axe to grind on the desirability of population growth, and the concomitant preferability of one-family houses over other housing options. I believe the author is using Wikipedia to give currency to a concept that is essentially his/her own. New Zealander Koro Neil (talk) 12:17, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Changes, and quesitons for Kiwis
I'm going to attach tags to some problem statements, fix some and rearrange things. But I will refrain from changing some things, for now pending guidance for native speakers of New Zealand English. The question is this: the article keeps equating a large single-family dethatched house with a "family home". This is a weird thing to do, given that many, many families in the world live in other styles of building. Is it common practice in NZ English to call only single detacheds "family homes" or is this the bias or previous editors showing through? I think this should be changed to use clearer, less loaded language. Also saying that “smart growth is the opposite of the New Zealand dream” seems to imply that the suburban home is the only patriotic choice for Kiwis, and that people who live in apartments or rowhouses are foreign or disloyal. Very weird. Kiwis please advise, is this really the thinking of all NZers? --Kevlar (talk • contribs) 17:41, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
 * It's certainly part of the Kiwi dream for families to grow up in a detached house with a large section. Of course, not all families do so, and not everyone who lives in a detached house is part of a family in the traditional sense. New Zealand doesn't have "row housing" as I understand the term, or at least it isn't common. The alternative to detached houses are apartment blocks (rarely more than two or three stories), inner city tower blocks (only in the last decade or so), and townhouses. The latter are much smaller complexes than are implied by our article townhouse which seems to be the same as row housing; in New Zealand they consist of a handful of dwellings on a site with some shared walls and spaces, but architecturally designed and with some class.- gadfium 21:17, 24 April 2012 (UTC)