HOUSES FOR £298

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 89, 14 April 1923, Page 9

HOUSES FOR £298

HOW IT IS DONE IN ENGLAND

BUILDING SCHEMES COMPARED.

At a moment when the Government is seekiug for a housing' policy which will let the.taxpayer down as lightly as possible, and when the large cities of the country are pressing for a state subsidy of £6 per house .per annum, Nottingham comes along with the news that it is going to build houses for £298 each and let them at an economic rent. With a gesture of independence rare Ja these days when local authorities wait like mendicants on the doorstep of the Treasury, it scorns the subsidy, refuses the help even of the ratepayer, and proceeds to build on its own responsibility.

Not unnaturally the Ministry of Health, anxious if it can to end JSiis business of subsidies and place house-build-ing again in the hands of private enterprise, has directed the attention of the importunate cities represented a£ the recent Manchester conference to tEe example of Nottingham, writes a correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian."' The Lord Mayor of Manchester has replied that the comparison of the Nottingham houses with the Manchester houses is irrelevant, in so far as the Nottingham houses are too small and other conditions are not ej^ual. The fact is that Nottingham itself would be the last to deny that, its houses fall far below the idealist's vision. of a working manY home, and it would be the first to repudiate many of. the things which seem to be claimed for its scheme in official quarters in London. • What has happened has simply been this. The architect to the Housing Committee realised as long ago as April of last year that the lowest inclusive rent (14s lid) of the non-parlour house which they were building was beyond the means of many ex-service men. He set himself the task of designing a house which could be let at 6s to 7s a week, which, with rates included, would be 11s a week. He took £300 as his figure and fitted a plan into it, allowing, in addition, £50 for land and road works. The lowest tender of £298 was accepted. Most of these houses have now been built, and the over-all .cost has worked out at £349 3s 7d. The forty-four.houses which the council proposes to build on its own initiative are slightly enlarged replicas of the first lot.of £300 houses, and the allover cost is estimated at £337 19s 7d.

Other authorities, building twelve to the acre, and sitting neither on the edge of nor below the Ministry of Health's none too ambitious standard of requirements as to size, may ask by what use of the black art Nottingham inveigles a £300 house out of the present-day builder The answer is simple. The £300 houses are built, not twelve, but twenty-four to the acre, they are built in blocks of four and eight, and the frontage of each house is a bare 12ft 3in. They are not built on garden-city lines, but are used to fill up small, partially developed sites, where roads were made before the war, and where the sites are hardly suitable for conversion into open spaces or children's playgrounds.

They are cunningly designed. From outside they have a substantial, prosperous appearance, and convey a suggestion of roominess inside which is dispelled by. closer examination. This disillusionment is inevitable, as the blocE of eight houses occupies the frontage which would normally be occupied by four. Downstairs there is the liv-ing-room, the scullery, bathroom, larder, and coal-hole; "upstairs there are two bedrooms, one without a fireplace, and in the roof there is another bed-, room. On the whole, the house will be about 2 per cent, below the standard requirements, but the proposed houses, Major Howitt estimates, will be 12 per cent, on the other side of the line. For ,£3OO, at to-day's prices, they seem to be excellent value, and nearly as good as some of the two-up-and-two-down type of house SO' common in Manchester. They may be a slightly tighter fit for the family when it sits downstairs, but the bedroom accommodation is rather better. Besides, every house has a bathroom of sorts, without which, apparently, no one dares-to erect a dwelling nowadays. That, at least, is one concession of the reconstruction period which economy has not yet niched from the ■working-class house.

If Nottingham is held up as a pattern for the rest of the country, the country should have an idea of what is in the Ministry's mind. Is it intended that town-planning ideals should be abandoned to allow of houses with twelve feet frontages to be built in rows at the rate of 24 to the acre? Or is Nottingham quoted for.the sole purpose of propaganda ?

The Ministry of Health had tried to give the impression that the £300 house was the house for which other towns had paid £900. Such a statement was nonsense. Even now, one is inclined to doubt whether Nottingham, without a subsidy, can produce a house within the' means of the ordinary working man. The rents of 36 of the new houses are to be 7s 4d, and the rents of eight are to be 7s 10d). but when rates and water charges are added these figures will have risen to 12s lOd and 13s 7d. Those rentals are only possible by allowing a mere 10 per cent, for repairs, empties, and management charges.

In one respect Nottingham may feel a certain amount of legitimate pride. It is one of the few towns which have been able to utilise the services of the professional house-builder—the speculative builder of pre-war days. Many of tho 45 builders who have been engaged on the Nottingham schemes have been of the old "speculative" ' type, and the contracts which they undertook varied from eight to forty. houaes at a time. The, city is convinced that it saved money by employing these men and by using lump-sum contracts with an up-and down clause for labour. No fewer than 1390 houses have been built and are occupisd under the assisted housing scheme.