A HOUSING PARLIAMENT

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 81, 5 April 1923, Page 6

A HOUSING PARLIAMENT

Shortage of houses seems to be as general as any of the civil disturbances created or accentuated by the Great War, and it will be of interest to many New Zealanders to learn that in France, with its notoriously slow inorease of population, the housing situation is among the great problems of the day. According to a report published recently by the "Manchester Guardian," the Minister of Hygiene, M. Strauss, has established a new Commission to deal with this subject. At the Senate, the report states, twenty-five schemes for improving the housing situation have been duly shelved. Deputies, mayors, and corporations, Ministers even, have made suggestion after suggestion without any obvious result. M.'-. Strauss's idea is that the various schemes have been in. competition, whereas on his Commission they are all to be united. In inviting everybody to the Commission who has shown himself a specialist on the building question he hopes to unite their efforts and produce a housing programme which shall be really capable of being carried through. In addition, the practical men are also to be invited to serve on the Commission to deal with a situation which grows daily worse. The Commission proposes to deal with the situation all round, whether with regional or national loan facilities or with the number of rooms of each apartment and the conveniences pertaining thereunto.

In New Zealand th© most conspicuous feature of the attempts to meet the housing problem has been the failure of most of the attempts by the Government and local bodies to meet the shortage by construction schemes, as the result of which the Government has reverted to the* policy of encouraging private enterprise by increasing the facilities for borrowing money for home-building., The greatest obstacle, however, appears to be a general lack of confidence. People who might otherwise build houses and let them for rent now refuse to invest their money in that way, and many who might build for themselves hesitate in the presence of a property market which they suspect is unstable. Energetic propagandists seem to have wasted their breath. It might be a useful step to hold a housing parliament in New Zealand, to bring together representatives of all the classes directly interested—the land-own-ers, the builders, the workers, the house-seekers, and the financiers— and try to find out what is wrong and how to put it right. One of the things that are wrong is that houses cost too much. A conference might correct this in two ways—by pointing out where costs are unduly high, and by showing how the average cost of houses can be reduced by the construction of a proportion of small and simple houses for those who cannot afford " bungalows."