HOUSES WANTED IN ENGLAND

New Zealand Times, Volume XLIV, Issue 10207, 18 February 1919, Page 6

HOUSES WANTED IN ENGLAND

In 1915 there were 73,000 marriages in excess of the marriages of 1913. •In the four years of war there have been at least 150,000 marriages above the number for .the preceding four years of peace. It is very doubtful if more than 25 per oeat. of the whole of those married since the autumn of 1914 have homes of their own. They will be hunting for houses in a few months. A A hundred thousand small houses arc wanted at once, an expert told a “Weekly Dispatch” representative, and they cannot be built for many months to come. There is a shortage of 500,000 houses all over the country, and when this shortage is made good we shall have to continue to build to meet the increase of tho nop’ulafion,’ and health and comfort, of those now living in insanitary and unsuitable houses. i A hundred thousand houses a year for the next ten years would do no more than provide decent houses for five millions of people, five million* whose -whole Hvbs would be completely changed by their occupation of decent, healthy houses. Another hundred thousand u year will bo needed for the newly married and the people who aspire to improve their environment. We could spend a thousand millions on the work, and we should be well repaid. And it most be spent either by private enterprise or by Hut Government. The Government cannot carry out its programme of building 300,000 houses next year unless more brickfields arc opened. We want an additional 50 per cent, output of bricks, unices a good proportion of the walls of tho new houses are built of concrete blocks in which coke breeze forms a big proportion. In tho thousands of army huts, soon to be unnecessary, the Government have millions of cubic feet of timber, acres of glass, thousands of doors, and millions of bnclt.s, ait of which can be used again in house building. 4n the hundreds of Uove-vrnment temporary offices are thousands of chairs and tables,, hundreds of carpets and ruga, acres bf linoleum, all of which, in the hands of a man gifted with imagination and blessed with a business instinct can go, on a fixed price basis, almost straight into the now houses for tho people.