The Housing Problem

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 85, 4 January 1935, Page 11

The Housing Problem

Sir, —I have followed the “Housing the People of Wellington” campaign with interest, and an ever-increasing conviction that the advocates thereof are less concerned about the people than about the houses. This, of course, will be indignantly repudiated by the architects, builders and would-be town planners, an 1 I hope these good people will pause for a moment and examine the implications of my conviction, not as an apparent reflection upon their honesty, which I do not intend, but as a challenge to their plans which, like many other modern “plans,” are based upon the assumption that the present industrial system can be revitalised by an urgent hustle of buying, spending, temporary “employment” and a blind faith in future consequences which is more a belief in miracles than any religious fanatic could exhibit, because in the plan, scant, if any, thought is given to the only thing that matters — i.e„ family life. Whenever the bureaucratic mind contemplates squalor, it becomes pregnant with a sort of statistical fury which bursts out in a torrent of figures. Thus. "Currente Calamo” in to-day’s issue confidently warns us that ‘'When we get to know the housing units available for decent accommodation of our population, when we are made aware of the sanitary conveniences available' for the city population herded in the congested areas, and when we learn the number of condemned houses still being occupied—well, we are going to get a shock and a jar le out civic conscience.” Perhaps so, but, as any reader of the housing conditions revealed in the last census figures (1926) can readily see, overcrowded dwellings, insanitary conditions, etc., have long been under our civic nose, and the “shock" has been conspicuous by its absence. The chief feature of the latest enthusiasm for slum clearance, and building projects, is the introduction to Wellington of the “flat” system, and in ali the discussions of it, argument based upon theory, and none on experience, or from the view point of working class families, has been put. forward. These ’after are distinct from current economics. A British building society’s advertisement expresses the theme well by—“ Better the smoke of << man’s own chimney than the fire of another.” It is an agreeable though); that the hopes o,f our “housing schemers” are doomed to disappointment. Nothing is more certain than that the people will not be satisfied with mathematically planted, asphalted playgrounds and public spaces. They will, aj every opportunity, pour into the real country by charabanc, car, cycle and hike, gathering bluebells and leaving behind that ineffably sordid litter of the townsman who has no property of his own nor hope of any, and no care for another’s.

Sir Austin Chamberlain condemned (in December, 1932) the “flat” system as an antidote to the slums, because in infancy a child never left the flat, and there came a certain stage of infirmity when an old person walked up the steps for the last time, and never came down again, until carried down in a coffin. “It seems to me,” he said, “that it would do more • for health, comfort and wellbeing. and would meet the wishes of those for whom I speak, in my own constituency, if we make their present houses decent and fit to live in .and still let them at small rents, rather than spend vast sums of moneys in pulling everything down in the hope that some day we will have ideal houses for everybody in ideal surroundings.” . '- , '.. ... It does not occur, to “Currente CaJamo” and those visionaries who are in great haste trying to serve the factory system, that the system depends for its very existence upon not economy, but on increased consumption of manufacture! materials, and that even capitalists are beginning to realise that, a man having a family and a house is a better ai)d larger purchaser than an uhemployed' person .in a council flat. TJie great evil which afflicts our system is centralisation,, and t hough seemingly banal to mention it, the obvious -cure .is. not intensification l of it, but simply-de-eentralisatio'n; i.e.,' disperse the mass, otherwise it will degenerate into the mob.—l am, etc.. . d. McLaughlin. ■Wellington, January 3.