BALANCE OF RATES AND RENTS

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 78, 2 April 1931, Page 8

BALANCE OF RATES AND RENTS

If, as the Mayor seems to say, the rents of the city leaseholds are half their capital cost, reclamation in Wellington is perhaps llie most successful public work ever carried out in New Zealand. At any rate, we I know of no big scale enterprise, public in character, that can claim to have created, out of nothing, real assets whose return redeems their initial cost every two years. Such an achievement is rendered possible only by the growth of the city, and that rate of growth must be maintained if the street-widening operations are to repeat, as the Mayor hopes, the financial success of the leased reclamations. Whether it is more profitable for a City Council to glean rents than rates depends on what use is made of the land, and that consideration also leads back to the same pre-requisite—the continued growth of Wellington. Enterprise would falter and rents would suffer if rates came to assume the proportion of rents, and this has happened in more than "one borough in New Zealand. At a time like the present the instinct of the citizens for economy in loan expenditure is sound, and the public outcry for economy all round would be insistent were it not for the cross-currents of unemployment and State-aided relief thereof/When the city takes on extra burdens, it is banking against the growth of Wellington. Suprema a situ is the sheet anchor. But even a city ideally situated could be overburdened. _..