SYDNEY’S SLUMS

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 354, 8 February 1937, Page 6

SYDNEY’S SLUMS

REPLANNING NEEDED. HOUSING CONDITIONS. Local Peoplle Do Not Realise Conditions. Press Association—Copyright. Sydney, February 7. Betty Riddell in the Sunday Sun, after mentioning the commencement of the Housing Improvement Board's efforts to replan the.slum areas of Sydney, says: “Everybody scejns to know about the slums of Sydney except the people of Sydney. Visitors from overseas' taken by unnamed guides through the industriaisuburlbs return to tell the world, or their corner of it, that we have here slums as bad or worse than the slums of London, Glasgow and Belfast. “If a slum is a dirty house in a dirty street where men . play cards sitting in the gutter with their booty off and babies cry and lie down with starved dogs, then we do have slums, and I saw them last week. And if a slum ie a house with the iron gone from the roof, holes in the floor, dirty paper shredded from the walls, the guttering taken from the roof by thieves and dirt and lice and cockroaches on the floors whose boards are so black and grimed that no scrubbing could get them clean, then we have slums.”

The Housing Improvement Board’s building schemes when formulated are to be submitted to the Govern ment.