HOUSES RUINED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 56, 7 March 1934, Page 14

HOUSES RUINED.

LANDLORDS' TROUBLES

DAMAGE DONE IN SYDNEY,

irresponsible tenants,

(From Our Own Correspondent.)

SYDNEY, March 1.

Yesterday a proposal came before the electricity committee of the City Council for the demolition of three cottages on city land, adjacent to the Bunnerong power house. Alderman Garden at once protested that these houses, were occupied by seven families of unemployed and that if dispossessed the occupiers would have nowhere to go. Sir Samuel Walder moved that the matter, bo deferred for further investigation, and this course was adopted. However, the statement made by Mr. Forbes Mackav, the general manager of the electricity department, that the houses were being robbed of their fittings could hardly be ignored by our aldermen, no matter how philanthropically disposed they might be. For it is notorious that houses which are left vacant here or are rented to irresponsible people very soon suffer irreparable damage. A few weeks ago the "Sydney Morning Herald" dwelt at some length on this strange development in the lower levels of our civic life—born, we must assume, of the depression and the destitution that has accompanied it. " Epidemic of Wanton Damage." There has been what the "Herald" terms "an increasing epidemic of wanton damage" where houses have been left vacant. "When tenants leave, pilferers descend upon the vacated premises. First they take the movable fixtures, then they purloin the materials of which houses are built.

A Newtown house agent described graphically to a Press interviewer this process of demolition, assuring him that hundreds of houses in South Sydney had been practically pulled to pieces. He instanced a weather-board cottage in Newtown, A week after it fell vacant, the fence disappeared. Then the doors were removed, and a start was made on the walls. Finally the agent, coming to inspect the property on his rounds, found that the whole thing had gone, leaving the allotment bare. Heavy Loss to Owners. Another example is in a Rcdfern etreet where there is a row of unoccupied houses. All the dividing walls have been pulled down by the marauders, only the fronts still remaining; so that, in the words of a local house agent, "anyone could drive a cart through the lot without once coming out on to the street."

In another terrace in Devonshire Street, the ■work of demolition began, at the back and worked gradually through the houses to the front, till at last tlie whole row of houses was in such a'ruinous condition that. the City Council served notice on the owner, ordering him to remove a dangerous structure. Owners cannot afford to go on repairing houses indefinitely, or to put custodians in charge of them. And this sort of thing goes on to some extent in all those quarters where the unemployed, paying little if any rent and thus feeling no sense of responsibility toward their dwellings, are most closely herded together.