Liverpool Plans to Eliminate Slum Property

Horowhenua Chronicle, 26 August 1930, Page 2

Liverpool Plans to Eliminate Slum Property

PHILANTHROPY AND BUSINESS METHODS FOUND TO BE EXCELLENT COMBINATION. LIVERPOOL. Social service on a business footing under a scheme by which the reconditioning- and making habitable of slum property is made to pay for itself, is the object of Liverpool Improved Homes, Ltd., a society started _ only two years ago with a philanthropic object, but which has been able this year to declare a dividend of 5 per cent. The problem which is tackled by the society is regarded as too vast for charity, even in a city where charit-, able work is particularly well organised, and it is claimed that if it is tackled on business lines it can be made to pay. - The Marquess of Salisbury handed over,.in the autumn of 1928, 80 small houses to the society's management. In the beginning of 1930 he handed over the rest of bis working-class property in Liverpool to them, thus adding over 400 tenancies to those for VN&hich it was already responsible. As owner or agent, some 000 houses arc under the society's care. It is worked on the Octavia Hill system. Women managers arc employed—since it has been found out that they are able to I work much more satisfactorily on the peculiar'problemspresented and with more sympathy, perhaps, than men—and the pivot on which the system turns is the personal collection of rents by the managers. The Marquess or Salisbury explained to the annual mooting held recently ir. the Liverpool Town Hall, over which the Lord Mayor, Lawrence D. Holt, presided, his reasons for putting so much of his property into the society's care. After the war he had thrown upon his hands through the falling in of leases a large amount of house property which ho was quite conscious was not fit for habitation, and which he had to find some moans of restoring to a standard which public opinion, as well as himself, could approve of. In a city like Liverpool there was no possibility. of the personal supervision of reconditioning which was possible in the country. He had heard of Octavia Rill ,and he realised that the Liverpool Improved Housing Society embodied her ideas and ideals.

Economics, said Lord Salisbury, were essential to the solution of the problem. He had tried letting people off their rents. But that caused a sort of universal demoralisation, and he came to the conclusion that such a plan was very bad. He did not,mean that the landlord should take no notice of a tenant’s misfortunes or of anything else which appealed to one’s compassion. But, broadly speaking, he ought to manage his property on business lines. And that, ho found, was the way in which this society workiSa,

end he recommended them as an efficient substitute for the landlord doing his own work in difficult circumstances. Decent housing conditions, said the chairman of the society, J. L. Williams, had been given to about 400 persons by, the society, and the expense wai no more than a little over £IOO per house. ' The society is now the owner of 78 cottages. and i two large houses in the centre of Liverpool. It buys poor property not bad enough to be condemned by the sanitary authorities, which, when it comes into the market, often falls into the hands of a poor class of speculator, whose chief concern is to get a large return on his money and to spend as little as possible on repairs and improvements. It aims at helping the poorest tenants, left in the overcrowded districts, where t‘hc>r needs have hardly been touched by public effort, and the condition of the l ouses has become worse rather than better during the last ten years. And one of its objects is to improve this, sort of property with very little or no increase of rents.