RELIEF TO CITY LEASEHOLDERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9218, 22 November 1888, Page 3

RELIEF TO CITY LEASEHOLDERS.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, — The above question has been temperately ventilated both in your own and yonr contemporary's columns. While no doubt; a matter requiring careful consideration, I do not see that it should present any grave difficulty if approached in a fair and impartial The period of enormously-inflated values is unfortunately only two well defined. Many private individuals as well as the Council received the advantages of that boom, but the former, almost without exception, have either from necessity or expediency been obliged to submit to the inexorable laws of depression and reaction, and be content to accept a fair instead of the ruinous rents contracted for. Seeing that legislation has piactically pronounced in favour of this method, and given power to the Council for the special purpose of affording relief, it is surely their bounden duty to do what they would each have had to do in his private capacity ; that is, grant a temporary reduction for some short period to those who have leased during the high tide of inflation, and this without the semblance of individual partiality or favouritism. The concession already granted to Messrs. Mason—though perhaps not a desirable precedentat least commits the Council to give the utmost relief they can to the other lessees, not only in Karungahape, but in Grey-street, and perhaps other places where ground rents are so "high, and the difficulty (almost the impossibility) of either letting or occupying to advantage, are at the present time quite as great.—l am, Ac., J USTXCJE.