SHACKS & HOVELS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 48, 25 August 1939, Page 11

SHACKS & HOVELS

HOUSING IN TE ARO

HIGH RENTS, FEW DECENCIES

TWO HOURS' VISIT

Two years ago the Wellington City Council carried out a wide examination of the central city area and of several of the suburbs. The report disclosed a shocking degree of overcrowding, of peopje living in flats and apartments without the bare necessities of reasonable comfort, of far too high rents, and of over 7000 unsatisfactory family units, whether dwellings or alleged apartments. Not much has been done since then to clean up even the worst of them.

Today, at the invitation of the Rev. H. Squires, of the Wellington City Mission, and the. Rev. O. E. Burton, of the Webb Street Methodist Church, a "Post" reporter accompanied a small party, of whi Mrs. C. Stewart. M.P., was a member, on an inspection of just a few of the shacks and hovels in the Te Aro area. It is an old story, the worse because. it varies little in details at each telling; nothing has been done, except that the people are different, rents are different, some of the disgusting properties have changed hands, and all of them are a little worse than they were a year ago.

The places—houses would be a ridiculous term to apply to them—visited were in Taranaki- Street. Cuba Street, Garrett Street, off Hopper Street, in Tui Street, and Sages Lane and Alpha Street. They all ran much to a pattern.

Someone said: "Why, they are so alike that they might have been designed by the same architect!" A libel on the whole profession, for there is not an architect in Christendom who would not blush to have his name coupled with these places. THE GENERAL PATTERN. They were all old, going back seventy years in some cases, • all wooden and rotten, guttering gone, the ground wet and mucky with black mud, tiny backyards and broken fences, paper pasted and repasted, layer on layer, ballooning down from ceilings, floors laid on the ground itself. They were alike, too, in the long-dead paint on their poor walls and in the rottenness of the roofing., and alike, again, in the extraordinary rents demanded, and, by evidence of the rent books produced, generally fairly well paid. ■

They were not all overcrowded One had only one adult, the mother of a family working elsewhere, but n was unique among this selection. The floor' was high off the ground (at the back; though wet in front) and its rent was the lowest of all, 12s weekly, but it had its drawbacks in no lighting, cooking on the living-room fire (for the range will not go), the fantastic dangling of the paper, and the rats. .Most.of them, for that matter, had rats, according to the tenants. CITY-OWNED PROPERTIES. City-owned property was included in the visit, in and off Taranaki Street, and here rents were the outstanding feature.1 One of these places, on its last rotten uprights, has four rooms for two adults and three children in one room, two adults in another, and two adults and a girl of twelve in still' another. The guttering and downpipes (of which city bylaws have quite & deal to say) are gone; rain pours down at the back door and under the floor (for this place, too, is built without piling). There is no bath. The rent is 20s weekly. And, worked out per .head of occupancy, it is not so bad, but for a shack of its' description 20s is a stopper.

In the same delightful block of residences, owned by the City Corporation, is a companion piece, with the same built-to-the-ground floor, the same rottenness of guttering and downpipe and filthy wallpapering, but the tenant* were vague about the number in occupation; possibly they were sensitive about numbers. They and Mr. Burton were clear about the rent—3os weekly.

And so away from city-owned property to Garrett Street, to a tiny hovel of two rooms for two adults and two children. No bath, of course.

Handy to this was a place in Cuba Street, much the same in external decrepitude, and inside' one bedroom, one living-room, one kitchen, for two adults and three children; no bath, no water inside, no washhouse, reeking with dampness, but as the housewife said: "All right in the summer." Rent: 16s a week.

After that it was largely repetition, calls and apologies for intruding upon the pitiful privacy of women and children living in such places and, except in two or three cases, maintaining the effort to keep them decently clean, sometimes with success, often not,.

And .Te Aro is only one of the sections of this city about to celebrate, with pomp and flourish, the advances of its first one hundred years!