HOUSING & SLUMS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 May 1939, Page 6

HOUSING & SLUMS

MUCH DEMOLITION NEEDED IN NEW ZEALAND MINISTER ON CONDITIONS IN CITIESAS "ROTTEN” IN SOME PLACES AS IN NEW YORK. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) CHRISTCHURCH, This Day. Emphasising the seriousness of the housing situation throughout New Zealand, the Minister for Housing (Mr Armstrong) in an address to the electors in Christchurch South last night, said a great deal of demolition work would probably have to be undertaken in the main centres before the Government’s scheme could be completed. “Half of Wellington should be pulled down,” said the Minister, “and the same applies to Auckland and Dunedin, and to a lesser extent to Christchurch,” The Minister added that on a trip abroad a few years ago, he had visited the poorer quarters of many of the bigger cities of the world. “Within a few hundred yards of Wall Street, the richest spot in the world, I saw in a few hours all the poverty I care to look at in my life,” declared Mr. Armstrong. "On my return to New Zealand I was taken by Dr. McMillan to the heart of Dunedin. There I saw slums just as rotten as any I had seen in New York, so you can see we have some work to do. 'People are living in these hovels and we want to shift them, but we will not be able to until we have houses for them to go to. Some of the homes in Dunedin .were condemned by the City Council and by the Health Department fifteen and twenty years ago; yet they are still being inhabited. The tragedy of it all is that people living in these terrible conditions are pensioners who have worn themselves out in making this country prosperous and what it is today. That sort of thing is not pecu-. liar to Dunedin either."