Tenants Resent Reference To “Insanitary Houses”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26472, 28 May 1947, Page 4

Tenants Resent Reference To “Insanitary Houses”

LANDLORD STATES HIS POSITION

“It is degrading and humiliating to be tenants of houses which the City Council states publicly are insanitary and dangerous,” was the comment of one of the housewives occupying the block of tenements in Glasgow street which formed the subject of a discussion by the council on Monday night. “People going past look at our homes as if they were dirty and unfit for habitation and it is most embarrassing. “ I know of scores of houses in Dunedin that are worse than ours,” she added. “If we have to vacate our homes, I have no idea where we shall go.” ,

According to the statements of some of the tenants, three of the houses are in satisfactory order, but the other two are badly neglected and even dangerous. The tenants of the three houses voiced strong objection to having their homes described as insanitary and were willing to show that they were not. The view was expressed, however, that there should be some law enforcing landlords to repair houses rather than that the tenants should be made homeless through no fault of their own. “I am not going to be like those poor squatters,” one woman stated. “I would refuse to vacate this house unless I had somewhere satisfactory to go. I am not going to have the worries of house-hunting at my time of life, nor do I want to shift to any suburb which would be inconvenient to my husband. My home is not a mansion but it is clean and has all conveniences. It has hot and cold water, electric light, a bath, and a flush lavatory, and I can’t see where it is falling to pieces. The council’s description might apply to the other

two houses, but not to these three,” she added.

“If times were normal I would pull down the houses and sell the land.” the owner told the Daily Times when approached yesterday for a statement on his intentions in respect to the building. “But I am thinking of the tenants, some of whom have been there for 25 years. They are paying only 13s or 11s a week, and I can’t provide them with a Buckingham Palace with such a return.

“It would cost £IOOO to repair the building properly and I cannot afford that sum,” he added. “ I have had no assistance from the City Council to keep the tenants in a house. If the council will repair the building, I am quite prepared for it to take the houses over until it gets its money back. I am certainly not going to repair the" houses in the circumstances. “I might add,” he said, “that the City Council should look after its own buildings. I was recently nearly killed by a piece of masonry that fell from the Town Hall and damaged a window sill near the entrance to the city treasurer’s department.”