UNIMPROVED VALUE RATING.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 52, 3 March 1930, Page 6

UNIMPROVED VALUE RATING.

I gather that "Rough Stough" is annoyed, seeing that he has forgotten his manners. This is because I held up to ridicule his carefullyfaked illustration, which was based on the "ability to pay" sophistry. His two cottages, costing £500 on £100 sections, with a £5000 mansion between, was intended to excite sympathy for the poor man; let us be thankful he didn't make them widows! But if "ability to pay" is sound, where is the difference, in principle, between charging a rich man double for the use of borough utilities and charging him double for the use of a national utility, to wit, a railway train ? lam told I lack imagination. What I lack "Rough Stough" supplies; he drew on. it heavily in the illustration quoted above. He says "it is not the land, but the house on the land, which benefits from the utilities provided." I should have thought it was the people who benefited. I have never heard of empty houses, any more than empty sections, using roads, mains, etc. Mr. Beale, I contend, is in error in thinking that large dwellings shelter the most people. It is in the small and cheap cottages that we find the most overcrowding, and two families under one roof. But in any case his argument is unsound. Take a flat-building on 50ft frontage, housing 20 people, and a detached dwelling on a similar section, accommodating five peopleIn the first case 50ft of utilities is' 1 all the local body is called upon to provide, or 2}ft per capita. In the other case it is 10ft per capita. I am not an advocate of flats, but if a residential area contained nothing but flats the cost of borough utilities would be very much less than if it contained nothing but detached dwellings. Mr. Beale's idea, then, that crowded buildings cause relatively large borough expenditure, is the very reverse of the truth. Having disposed of this point, my "ability to pay" train to Wellington illustration still holds. C.H.N.