MANAWATU DAILY TIMES WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1910. THE HOUSE FAMINE.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIII, Issue 14206, 3 September 1919, Page 4

MANAWATU DAILY TIMES WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1910. THE HOUSE FAMINE.

An optimist is a politician who is certain that he can work miracles with other people’s money. Sir Joseph Ward placed his hand on his breast at the Wellington Town Hall on Monday night and declared to an audience convulsed, not with laughter but with, wild applause, that notwithstanding the high x ,r ic« of timber, land, ironmongery and everything, ho could, if he were but given the opportunity, erect workers ’ cottages and let them on a rental basis of 10/6 a week. No ordinary business man with a reputation at stake would dare rise in a public place and make that assertion, but w3 have no doubt that there are thousands of confiding people who, having seen the declaration in cold print, and knowing that it was made by a reputed ‘ ‘ wizard of finance.,” will accept it confidingly —and cast their vote in the right direction. Of course, It may be possible, operating on a. wholesale scale and under Government auspices, to crowd together hero and there bunches of shacks or tenements all of one pattern and with a minimum of land and air space, but workers’ cottages, that is a very different mat-

ter! Sir Joseph Ward went a little further than that: ho spoko of suburban homes for the toilers, ‘'far from the madding crowd, ' ' and yet contiguous by ‘‘fast suburban trains' ’ (a phrase greeted with “laughter" by his auditors), where the surroundings would be elysian, and three cows and a little pig components of the local landscape. As to whether the mammalia and the porcino were included in the “rint" in this instance is not made very clear in the report, but on the basis that a politician may as well bo hung for a sheep as a lamb, 'twill serve. One should really never look a semi-gift animal in the mouth! But leaving Bir Joseph Ward to his rustic wooing, a very serious state of things has got to be faced, and that immediately. • • • * Take the experience of Palmerston North. Here people are being turned out into the streets because their tenements have been ‘ ‘bought over their heads." In some cases returned soldiers have been the buyers. In others speculators have got in ahead of the returned soldiers, and have made a good clean up of the “Massey deposit." In some cases the soldiers may be getting full value, in others they are not. They are paying new money for old houses. “No children admitted," is spattered over many lintels, and some citizens with large families and small salaries are having a very unenviable time indeed. To add to the trouble, settlors who have been aggregated out of their holdings at a good advance, are coming to town to live and are buying the better-class houses. Some shrewd landlords, avid of such opportunities, have houses which are “not to be let." The natural tendency of nil these things is to “put rents up all round," and to make “the cost of living" figure a good second in the record of post-war distractions. * « # # To the politicians, wo suppose, wo shall have to turn for help. If houses could be built with the cement of promises there would soon bo no dearth, but the machinery of State is a creaking and cumbersome thing. The most expeditious and satisfactory way of going about the thing would bo for the Government to distribute about £4,000,000 amongst the various local bodies and empower them to invoke local expert knowledge and treat housing as “the matter of urgency." Unfortunately the people who would most benefit by local control are bitten with the bug of “nationalisation," and while the pros and cons are being competitively debated (with a general election in sight) the prospect of relief to the families concerned is not hopeful. We blame the politicians of course, but the fault is not so greatly with them as with the people wdio put them there. Just so long as the electors can be fed on catchcries just so long will they have to content themselves with inferior results..

There arc a lot of sufferers from the housing trouble, but we do not hoar of them coming together and putting themselves on record in a way that will convince the politicians that there is really something doing. An indignation meeting hero and a recital of things as they are would do a lot of good at the present time. Tho Borough Council is in labour with a garden suburb project for its employees, and tho scheme looks good to us, nerspoctivoly, but the Borough Council is not on record as telling tho Govortiment in good terse English that this investment of soldiers' loans in ancient tenements is bad business, and that no advances should be made for soldiers except in new bricks and mortar, timber or concrete. The trouble in New Zealand is that the populace has got so hypnotised with the “Government’s got to do it" idea that they have contracted the sleep and lean habit and it is hard to get a move out of them. But in the housing problem the community *ia, to use an Americanism, “up against it good and hard." It is eminently and distinctively everybody’s business and must receive urgent attention_