CHEAP HOUSES.

Auckland Star, Volume LI, Issue 76, 29 March 1920, Page 4

CHEAP HOUSES.

The Railway Department is to be congratulated on the energy and ideas it is bringing to bear on the housing problem. It is actually proposing to build, to begin with, for Its own employees, four hundred houses, which is nearly a hundred in excess of tho number that the State Housing Department has building or planned for the whole of the Dominion. The one Department seems to be setting the other an excellent example in organisation for quick and cheap work. It is going to standardise its houses, and supply the wood from I its own forests and mills. According to the "Railway Review," the framing and weather-boarding of the houses are to be cut to the exact dimensions at the Department's mill at Mamaku, and fittings will be supplied from a large joinery factory that has been established in the North Island. By sending to the 6ite timber ready cut to the required lengths, most of the cutting and fitting that costs so much for labour on the ordinary building job will be eliminated. If the Government in its general housing policy adopted such methods it should be able to provide houses more cheaply than it can under the system of a number of contracts. We notice that in an article in the current "Empire Review," the Agent-General for British Columbia tries to interest England not only in wooden houses, .but in standardised wooden houses. He describes a system in vogue in Canada of putting houses together in sections at the mills, and sending them out in such a form that they can easily be "knocked togethor' , by tbe purchaser without, even the help of a skilled carpenter. It is calculated, he eaye, that an SOOO ton steamer of a kind built in Vancouver, could carry to England from five to six hundred houses in "knock-down" form. Canada may have something valuable to teach us in cheap construction, and it might even be worth our Government's while to coneider the question of importing q shipload of ready-made houses from British Columbia.