"UNCLEAN YARDS."

Auckland Star, Volume XXIV, Issue 246, 17 October 1893, Page 2

"UNCLEAN YARDS."

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —It must be satisfactory to tho citizens to know thab the Sanitary Inspoctor and his staff are alivo to their onorous dutieß. Auckland has a fair reputabion for health aud cleanliness, bub 1 venture to assert thab anyone whose business leads him among the closely-builb blocks of our esteemed city, will agree with me, that there iH an immense work before Mr G. Goldie. His office is no sinecure. There ie especial danger in such crammed up properties as exißt in Grey-streob. In too many cases tho city byo-Inws have been großsly violated by landowners whose cupidity seems to have led them to build four houses whore there was but room for one, or two at most ; nnd in some cases on the roar of allotments already builb on, thus robbing the front houso of its proper yard, drying ground or cordon plot which originally belonged to ib. In such cases you will find a right-of-way, which haa to do duty as a etreob or alley. In some cases there is an attempt at subdivision into yards (?), in which tho owner would find ib difficult to dry the washing of two persons, while ho complacently takes the rent from a family. In other cases those crowded tenements have the merciful provision of "one yard in common" (merciful Providence !) with the natural result that ib is a " common " yard indeed, a mutual offence, and a menace to the health of their more cleanly neighbours. Ib is bad enough for the poor bo have to live in cottages too small for their families' needs, bub when, added to this they are debarred tho privacy and right of a separate yard, the city must boar the penalty of the moral and physical evils of auch a state of thingß. Ownership of property has its responsibility, nob tho least of which is thab of seeing to ib thab the drains are not defective and overflowing, which is too commonly the case. Let us hope thab as the hot weather advances, the inspectors will make their valuable services folt whenever occasion calla for their interference.—l am, etc., George Rhodes, Ferabank, Poneonby.