WHY HOUSES ARE DEAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 1 May 1920, Page 10

WHY HOUSES ARE DEAR.

FACTORS IN BUILDING. ECONOMIES TO BE EFFECTED, VIEWS OF AN ARCHITECT. Everyone is more or less interested'in the price of building, and it may he useful to endeavour to trace some of the causes of the difficulty which all arc experiencing in getting homes and the enormous, if not exorbitant, cost of any sort of new erection fit for habitation. _ "There have been undoubtedly great rises in the price of materials owing to the ordinary law of supply and demand," said a prominent architect to a Wellington Post reporter recently. "Supplies are short and demands great, but the public is not satisfied that these' rises are sufficient to account for the enormous increases demanded by builderg at the present time, and there is a general feeling that profiteering is more or less rampant in the building trade. STATUS OF THE BUILDER. "What i? the status of the builder at present? Years ago a person wishing to build, usually employed an architect to draw up the plans and specifications, and these gentlemen obtained competitive tenders, each man putting in his price on a definite and uniform basis; This method, apparently, worked well, but, in the minds of some, it was considered that the small percentage paid, to the architect for his services might be saved, and the builder who objected to competitive prices was not slow to impose upon the would-be householder that he (being a perfectly honest man) would give good value "without being supervised, and that the money paid to the architect might as well be spent on some tangible improvement to the house. CUTTING OUT THE ARCHITECT. "With the help of some youth, probably taught at the night class of the Technical School, the builder was able to show a drawing which would meet the' Corporation acquirements, and the archi-' tect would in many cases be eliminated. Naturally the profits of these non-com-peting builders would be just about as high as they dare make them, and by' degrees the prospective house owner, comparing tlie price submitted by builder Jones with the cost of his neighbor's house built by builder Robinson, would be satisfied that he was having a fair deal. The net result of this practice alone has been to raise the cost of houses without increasing their efficiency and has also had the effect of making builders unwilling to work under the direction of architects when they can hope to find someone who will allow them to be the interpreter of their own contracts. "GO-SLOW" LABOR. "Another cause of the high price of building is the dicinlination of the workman to in any way extend hlmserf. This is largely owing to the union policy of having an uniform wage and not allowing piece-work. Where originally in a certain 'time a man would fix a given number of feet of weatherboarding and would lie valued and paid in accordance with the amount of work lie did, the same, man will probably now be doing a little over half simply because he has seen that his fellow workman who was 'going slow' received as much for his services as the industrious man did for his. This undisputable fact of the reduced production in a given time extends through all the building trades and lias consequently increased the. labor bill to a higher extent than the very large increase in wages would warrant*. MINOR DETAILS. "The by-laws have to a certain extent increased the cost of houses, as the requirements regarding drainage and other matters are more than they used to be, J but on the whole we may take it that the public has value for the money spent in this direction. There are some anomalies with regard to sizes of timbers that might with advantage to the public be removed, but the saving thus affected would not be great. MOST PERNICIOUS OF ALL. "Perhaps the most pernicious system that is tending to the high cost of building is that of the builder ceasing to be the contractor, but receiving a commission of 10 per cent, on the cost of the work carried out by him. In this system there is no competition in the matter of prices of labor and materials; the more the builder spends and the ; more expensive his methods are the more pay he gets. If he gets out-his work badly, and it has to be pulled down and rebuilt, he gets rewarded, instead of being punished, for his carelessness. He has no inducement to buy in a cheap market, for the more the article so»ts the more he gets, His anxiety is to push the work through quickly, so he offers higher wages than those current to entice workmen from the other builders, and the higher the wages he pays the more lie gets. This system is a great factor in the constantly increased cost of building, for it does away with competition, and, after all, competition is the only way of preventing exploiting and monopoly. BETTER TRANSPORT. "Mentioning monopolies," said the architect, "naturally leads up to shipping and freights, and the Union Shipping Company. All three are causes in the "raising of the prices of building. With better means of carriage, goods that are cheap in one part could be transferred to another where there is an increased demand for them, and so some materials would be reduced in price. THOSE PLUMBERS! "The plumbers have formed a close union and, with the help of an Act of Parliament, are able to check competition with workmen (quite competent men most likely, but not classed as master plumbers), and, having agreed among themselves to a scale of charges, have raised the cost of plumbling considerably in advance of what the writer thinks is warranted by the increased cost of material and workmanship. HOUSES-POOR PROPERTY. "These are some of the reasons why houses are dear, but the scarcity is. of course, partly due to the legislation which declared that the house owner should be satisfied with the minimum interest on his outlay, wbile other channels for investment were left open, in which the would-be investor couia get the maximum for his money. Houses are now a poor form of pjjjpperty to hold If tenanted, they are difficult to sell, as the purchaser may not be allowed possession; if empty, a great loss and responsibility. These facts being gener-

ally recognised, it would appear that if pebple who cannot afford to own their houses are to be housed, it will have to be done by the State or by local authorities and not by individuals, as it has been in the past. NO SOLUTION IN CONCRETE. "The man who says lie has solved the house question because he thinks he has found a new aggregate for concrete (probably one that has been known to practical men as long as concrete itself has been known), or who sees his way, if lie can get hundreds of houses built on the same design, to save something in the boxing, another fact which has been apaprent to concrete experts from the- earliest time, offers no real help to his fellows, simply because his saving at the most eouid amount to very little, and that saving he would want for himself, and it would not go to the public. We simply want less waste of time and middlemen's profits in the production of the materials that go to make a building, and more industry and fair dealing on the part of those wno work the materials, and keener competition between the masters who employ the workman, so that profiteering can be wiped out. WHY NOT BUILD IN GROUPS! ■ "If. encouragement was given to the building of groups of houses and the aggregation into fair-sized plots (common to all) of the spaces now between bu.ildings, a considerable saving in the cost of sites would be effected. From a health point of view it would be better to have the air space behind or in front of .the buildings rather than at the sides. Windows drawing the light and air from three or four feet wide damp, draughty passages are nothing like as effective as they would be if they faced the wider space in front or in the I rear of the buildings. A minimum | Frontage in a by-law is probably ultra vires, but whether it is or not is of questionable good in preventing overcrowding, and certainly adds to the cost of building, and to the extension and consequent expense of reading and its upkeep. It must not be taken that the architect is in favor of small allotments, for he believes in a large average air space to each house, but he feels that the present Wellington conditions mean waste of space without effectiveness. As a-fire guard, he would insist upon thick brick or concrete walls between buildings, and uninterrupted access to both back and front of all houses."