A KEEN DEMAND

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 108, 2 November 1940, Page 10

A KEEN DEMAND

STATE-BUILT HOUSES

A LONG WAITING LfST

MINISTER'S REVIEW

Since the Housing Department commenced operations 8700 houses had been finished and occupied, said the Minister of Housing (the Hon. H. T. Armstrong) at the opening of the State flats at Berhampore yesterday afternoon. There were another 2963 houses in course of construction, making a total of 11,663 houses which had either been completed or were under construction since the Department came into existence three years ago.

"They are not being built as fast as we would like," said the Minister, "but what we are doing in Wellington and in Auckland and in every other part of New Zealand where there is an acute shortage of housing is to utilise the services of every builder and of every skilled artisan who knows anything about the building of houses. That is all it is humanly possible for us to do."

WELLINGTON SCHEME

Mr. Armstrong said he welcomed the Wellington City Council scheme of helping people wishing to build for themselves, for the reason that it gave people an additional choice. At the | same time, said the Minister, unless more material and more men became available, it would not be possible to produce more houses, because they were building all the houses it was possible for them to build at the present time. It would be possible to do more if there was an easing up in some other direction, and he thought some other things could well afford to wait until they caught up with the shortage, of houses. For the time being the material and men required for the construction of military hutments, etc., had resulted in a serious setback to the housing scheme, but the military work would soon be finished and the meni would be coming back. to get on with the job of building houses. The Department was not going to ease up if it could possibly help it.

The more houses the Department built, continued Mr. Armstrong, the more people knew about them and the more jealous they became of people already occupying State houses, with the result that the demand for the houses, instead of diminishing in proportion to the number of houses that were built, was increasing week by week. In Wellington and in the Hutt Valley the Department had completed 1657 houses, which were all occupied. There were some hundreds of houses now in the final stages of being completed, but the work had been hung up in some cases for various materials and because there was a shortage of skilled labour to do the finishing part of the job.

FUTURE BUILDING

"We have acquired land in Wellington and in Johnsonville sufficient to build 1826 houses, and we have sufficient land in the Hutt Valley to build another 3849. Including the houses already built in Wellington and in the Hutt Valley, we have sufficient land for 5675 houses. It is sufficient land to house a population of something like 25,000 people. There are employed in New Zealand today on housing construction 5092 men. People are beginning to ask, when they are told how many are on the waiting list before them, where the people lived before we started to build houses, and that is what I am beginning to wonder myself, because there are at the present time 21,848 people with applications in for State houses on our waiting list. Of that total 7142 are in the City of Wellington and 8785 in the City of Auckland, so that 15,900 of the 21,000 live in those two cities. That simply goes to show how acute and how serious the housing problem is in these two cities, as compared with other parts of New Zealand."

There were people, said Mr. Armstrong, who said that houses were only being built for the well-to-do and that the ordinary working-class family had little or no chance of getting one of the State houses. Recently he had had "reports made to him of the houses allocated in each of the large centres, giving the names, occupations, and incomes of the tenants, and he liad found that the income of the .State tenant ranged from 30s to £7.a week. It was very rarely that anyone who had an income of more than £7 a week received a State house. The provision of houses by the State was the only way by which thousands of poor families could possibly get a decent house to live in at a price possible for them to pay out of their meagre incomes.

Mr. Armstrong declared that, if those newspaper editors who were demanding that the State call a halt in the building of homes were as conversant with the needs as he was, they would not write in the strain they were.