Can Hopes Be Houses?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 360, 17 May 1946, Page 5

Can Hopes Be Houses?

T would be ridiculous to suggest that A.M.R.’s article on Page 12 solves the housing problem. It is not offered as a solution. But it would be more ridiculous still to think that nothing can be done by individual effort to ease the problem; that we have nothing to learn from other countries because they are other countries; and that no part of Stockholm’s plan could be applied to New Zealand cities because it is not applicable as «a whole. We print the article to give interested readers something definite to think about; a foundation of fact for their obstinate questionings. Every homeless New Zealander is wondering how to cease being homeless. It is not a question of approving or disapproving what has been done already, but of doing something additional as an individual to get a permanent roof over his own head. Thousands of similarly placed people in Stockholm have built homes with the municipal aids outlined in A.M.R.’s article. The question is: What adaptation of those aids, if any, would bring relief, even a moderate amount of relief, to our own doors? It is no use telling a man how to build a house if he can’t get building material; or helping him with loans if he can’t buy. The Stockholm scheme will not cut down trees or fill up cement bags. It will not take workmen into the wilderness to live as their grandfathers lived 75 years ago. But it could, or perhaps could, start a few hundred young New Zealanders building homes instead of shacks at week-ends, camping on building lots of their own instead of on the land of strangers, and even, it might be, acquiring some unconscious lessons in citizenship. A.M.R. makes no definite claims, and we make none. We suggest merely that he has injected some hope into a multitude of vague dreams.