NO SLUMS IN EPSOM.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14809, 12 October 1911, Page 8

NO SLUMS IN EPSOM.

A STATEMENT RESENTED.

The suggestion that slums are being cultivated in Epsom is strongly resented by Mr. W. R. Bloomfield, chairman of the Epsom Road Board. Mr. Bloomfield, speaking to a reporter last evening, said two families were living in one of the Hospital Board's houses, but the remarks made on the subject by Mr. P. M. Mackay, chairman of the Hospital Board, were wholly unwarranted and unfair. No suburb of Auckland, said Mr.. Bloomfield, had fought so strenuously to regulate suburb-planning, to keep up the standard of the minimum building area, and to prevent any tendency to slumdom as Epsom. The greater part of the houses in the district were built upon one-quarter-acre sections and larger areas, and until recently , a-quarter-acre was the minimum fixed by the bylaws. The hospital endowment" wag laid out in quarter-acre sections under compulsory by-laws at that time. The minimum area was reduced to one-fifth-acre about 12 months ago, after a great struggle, but luckily the district had been so much subdivided and settled on quarteracre sections that little harm could be done to the district by the reduction of the minimum, to which he was opposed. " Let, Mr. Mackay or anyone else," ho said, "go to the top of Mount Eden and look around, and they will be able to pick out the locality which has been settled on the most healthy conditions, and most in keeping with modern ideas of town-plan-ning. So far as our-by-laws are concerned there is a,provision under which anyone who attempts to convert one house into'two comes under the conditions' affecting a new house, and has to get a permit. If he does not do so, then he commits a breach of the by-laws." Mr. Bloomfield added that he had been informed that the house referred to had some sort of a temporary division, and that part had been let to a sub-tenant. It would be most difficult to prevent such an arrangement.