RACK RENTS

Grey River Argus, 25 June 1946, Page 7

RACK RENTS

WELLINGTON COMPLAINT. WELLINGTON, June 24. Legislation, regulation, by-law, licensing, Frice Tribunal, Labour Department, and Magistrate’s Court all thrown in, Wellington continues to have rent racketeering. It is said that the people hardest hit —those existing in “digs,” rooms, apartments, and flats—dare not lift a fi iger to help themselves for fear that they will be thrown out or that conditions will be made so uncomfortable for them that they will be glad to leave. An instance of the essential reluctance of tenants to protect themselves arises’ in a house where eight rooms (some “double”) are rented, mostly at £2 5s a week, to business women, plus 5s a week for gas and light, and pennies (.usually at least three) in the slot for a bath. One kitchen and one bathroom are provided for a total of about a dozen residents. One of the rooms' in the place is a pokey little one for the magnificent bargain price of 35s a week and another, with the inestimable amenity of a tiny sun balcony, costs £2 10s a week. Asked why the Labour Department had not been approached for an assessment of the fair rent, a tenant said that that had been considered, but the owner’s representative had told them that the Department could do nothing about, it. In this house, no expensive partitioning, plumbing, or wiring had been involved to convert it into an obviously profitable investment. It has been suggested that an official record, absolutely watertight and untampered with, signed inviolably, by tenants themselves, without prejudice or victimisation, should be kept in every flatting, rooming, and other apartment and boarding establishment. The idea is not only to provide the Income Tax and Labour Departments and the Price Tribunal with a true picture of affairs —balanced, fairly enough, against certified maintenance and repair charges'—but also to demonstrate to incoming tenants that the previous rent for any part of accommodation is the maximum they should pay. Not long ago a returned serviceman from Timaru was transferred by his employers to Wellington at a net salary of more than £6 a week. After seven hours of searching, he eventually found a room shared by two other male boarders and was charged £2 5s a week for bed and a cup of tea and a slice of toast each morning. Baths cost 3d each. After paying up to 5s a day for other meals and 6s on Sundays, laundry charges, and other incidentals, he usuallyi finished the week with 2s or 3s m hand. There was not even a lounge or sit-ting-room in the establishment, so his spare time was usually spent on his bed reading a borrowed book. Over a period of several weeks the only alternative accommodation he could find was in what was called a private hotel. He ascended countless flights of stairs', and groped around corners and long passages which had never seen the light of day, until he was ushered into a boxlike dungeon. It had no windows, but was blessed with a small skylight in the roof. The rental asked for bed and “breakfast” was 35s a week. He retreated rapidly, and shortly afterwards retreated further, back to Timaru, having resigned his job (which appeared to have good prospects) when he found he could not make ends meet under tolerable living conditions, and returned South to go farming. Parallel cases of despondent searches for accommodation, suitable for human workers at prices that workers can pay occur- every day m Wellington, according to many who are in the thick of the scramble.