A CONGESTED CITY. What are we doing about it?

Free Lance, Volume IV, Issue 211, 16 July 1904, Page 6

A CONGESTED CITY. What are we doing about it?

WELLINGTON is overcrowded. The Premier has stated that parts of it have more people to the acre than Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Sheffield. People who should be living m ten-shilhngs~a-week houses live m twenty-five-shilling ones, the front rooms being let to "a respectable married couple, without encumbrances." The boarding-houses m the city are, as a rule, so closely packed that one patient mob of paying guests sit round the dining-room walls until the more-favoured ones, who got off the mark when the bell rang, have finished their meal ♦ • ♦ Boarding-house keepers don't, as a rule, refuse accommodation to "good marks," and the result is that a very large number of boarders m Wellington sleep in stuffy quarters, in rooms that contain any number of beds from one to six. There is, or ought to be, some air-space regulation for

people as well as houses. There is a regulation fixing the number of people who may use a public vehicle, but there seems to be no limit to 1 the number of people who may live in one house, or the number of houses that may be dumped on to one pathetic bit of land Seems to us that there is enough land m New Zealand to go round. • * • The municipal authorities can't turn people into the streets without providing them with homes to go to. Far-off Johannesburg, the execrated dumping-ground for Asiatics, has already provided municipal cottages, to be rented at a reasonable price to working men, and the city, large as it is, is not congested. The winds of Wellington are its safeguard. Without this purifying element, the reeking, unscavanged streets, the crowded areas, the sardine style of living, and the apathy of the authorities to the decencies of domicile, would make it impossible for the place to be otherwise than anything but a reeking hot-bed of fever. •* * • The housing of the surplus population will have to be seen to sooner or later There is ample evidence that the congestion will become more pronounced, as the city is attracting large numbers of newcomers. What are we going to do' with them ? Wellington is already brought up with a round turn against hills. Still, there are avenues, which a far-sighted Council could easily avail themselves of. Cramped conditions are destructive of morality, of a decent physique, and inimical to health. Let the municipality tackle the question of providing homes and access to them while the scheme of general improvement is going on.