CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS
HOUSING SHORTAGE To the Editor There has been a lot of discussion by local bodies, etc., regarding the present acute housing problem and suggestions for temporary housing schemes have been argued for and against, but the most important feature does not receive sufficient consideration. It is that people are wanting their own homes and many would be able and glad to build if the costs were reduced and supplies of materials increased. Many more returned men, and civilians, too would then be able to solve their own housing problems. It is houses that are desirable, not flats or huts. This is a time of emergency in home building and pressure should be brought to bear to have essential home building freed from the added burden of sales tax, which is as much as £200 or more. The present house building cost of £2 to £2 5/ per square foot is a millstone sufficient to sink any working man, to say nothing about a family man. Supplies of materials are nowhere in good enough supply and they are too costly. Many avenues of supplies are open for exploitation by someone with the will and imagination to solve the problem. DAD.
Permit me to compliment you on your leading article, "The Challenge." If the Government does not now introduce temporary emergency legislation to include an immediate careful house survey, with a view to the voluntary, and where necessary, compulsory billeting of servicemen in unoccupied houses (at seaside, etc.) and part-occupied houses, we may soon witness "vigilante societies at work in this country also. Such an action would be wrong. FIRST N.Z.E.F.
There are hundreds of rooms and flats empty and they are going to remain .empty until amendments are made to the law affecting both private houses and apartments, and until we have the right to terminate a tenancy at any time we want. We do not want empty rooms, but from our experiences of past tenants we are not again renting them under the laws existing to-day. If we get' in tenants who act like human beings then we want to keep them. The first thing they do when you take them in is to remove the electric globes and put in very powerful ones. It is no concern of theirs that electricity is short. They keep the lights going in several rooms at the same time and most of them all night to,warm their rooms. They possess all the electrical gadgets imaginable and make use of them, too. The only thing we have left to us now is the privacy of our houses, and this we are going to keep. What about some of the large houses possessed by some people with only two occupants? Take them, I say, if they will allow you. There has been no fair play for landlords and landladies in the past, but we are going to get it now. Yes. sir.
HANDS OFF OUR PROPERTY.
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CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS, Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 170, 20 July 1945
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493CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 170, 20 July 1945
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