HAMILTON VISITOR SUGGESTS WHAKATANE SHOULD HAVE ITS OWN ALLOCATION COMMITTEE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 4, 27 June 1949, Page 5

HAMILTON VISITOR SUGGESTS WHAKATANE SHOULD HAVE ITS OWN ALLOCATION COMMITTEE

Our Housing* Problem

Whakatane could, and should, have its own State house allocation committee. That is the opinion expressed by Mr Chas Greeves, of Hamilton, president of the Hamilton branch of the Home Servicemen’s Association, member of the Hamilton Rehabilitation Committee and its housing sub-committee, and member of the Hamilton Civilian Housing Allocation Committee.

He was here for a brief period the other day, got into conversation with some local citizens and, naturally, heard about our housing problems. Being something of an pert on housing problems, he was only too glad to come up to the Beacon office and discuss housing in general, but the allocation of State houses in particular.

Dissatisfaction Here? * We rather laboured that point -with him, because we felt a lot of people around here are not altogether satisfied with , the present set-up, and feel that they would have more chance of getting their cases considered on their merits and fully investigated if there were a local committee on the job. Mr Greeves quoted the Minister as having said recently that citizens of any locality which needed a Housing Allocation Committee should ask for it.

He thought, from what he could hear of the situation here, and from his own observations, that this place definitely needs one. We agree, and feel a large proportion of our readers, will agree also.

It appears that these committees are appointed by the Minister on recommendations from the district M.P., with, the exception of one member, who is a representative of the local body in whose area the houses to be allocated are—in this case the Whakatane Borough Council. The others should be, and usually are, appointed because of their known interest in the problem, but are not direct representatives of any organised bodies. Their task is to study all the applications for houses in their

area, peruse and discuss reports on investigations made by State

Advances officers and, where

they think it necessary, make further investigations themselves, or ask for fuller reports from the authorities.

At the moment in a lot of centres, the local Rehabilitation Committee is given half the available houses and allocates thorn to ex-service personnel and the civilian Housing Allocation Committee allocates the other half. However, Mr Greeves said he would recommend as preferable a combined Allocation Committee such as was recently established with good results at Cambridge. That committee comprises half ex-servicemen and half civilians, and its job is to consider all

cases on their merits, taking all relevant facts into consideration! Rehab, v Civvy Without wanting to create a “rehab v civvy” argument, Mr Greeves expressed the opinion that under the present common practice, Rehabilitation cases were getting really more than a fifty-fifty share of what was going, for this reason: Everywhere he had been lately the proportion of civilian families requiring accommodation was more than 2 to 1 to ex-service applicants, and in quite the majority of cases their needs were more desperately urgent. Effect was that in many places, including Hamilton, the Rehabilitation Committees had been able to cater for their people far better and to house people in better circumstances than many of the civilians. Worst Cases First Statistics, he said, would bear out on a national basis that there were at least 2 civilians to 1 ex-service-man needing housing, and he considered that we had now reached a stage when all applications should be pooled and handled by one authority in each area so that the most urgent cases would come to the top. That view, he mentioned, is accepted by the 2 N.Z.E.F. Association, which takes the line that its members are not only ex-servicemen, but first and foremost members of the community He said he felt the R.S.A. must come to realise that, too.

He pointed out in this regard that, through the fifty-fifty principle, most really urgent ex-service cases had been dealt with, and now a majority of the ex-service applicants for State tenancies were younger men either just married or with small families, whereas on the civilian list were some really desperate cases of family men unable to find any accommodation at all for wives and large numbers of children. 1 Whether or not the idea of a combined allocation committee appeals to Whakatane residents, Mr Greeves concluded, he did think it was a clumsy and unnecessary system to have the allocations handled by a committee in Tauranga, which could hardly be expected to make the same thorough investigations that could be made by local people.