Liverpool Plans to Eliminate Slum Property

Otaki Mail, 1 September 1930, Page 4

Liverpool Plans to Eliminate Slum Property

PHILANTHROPY AND BUSINESS METHODS FOUND TO BE EXCELLENT COMBINATION. "~ LIVERPOOL. Social service on a business footing under a scheme by which the reconditioning and making habitable of slum property is made to pay for itself, is the' object of Liverpool Improved Homes, Ltd., a society started only two years a.go with a philanthropic object."but which has been able this year to declare a dividend of 5 per cent.

The problem which is tackled by the society is regarded as too vast for charity, even in a city where charit-

able work is particularly well organised, and it is claimed that if it is tackled on business lines it can be made to pay. The Marquess of Salisbury handed over, in the autumn of I!>2S, SO small houses to the society's management. In the beginning of 1930 he handed over the rest of his working-class property in Liverpool to them, thus adding over 400 tenancies to thosa,jfor. which it was already responsible: "As. owner or agent, some GOO houses are under the society's care. It is worked on the Octavia Hill system. managers are employed —since it. 'has been found out that they axe able to work, mueh more satisfactorily on the peculiar problems presented and with more sympathy, perhaps, than men—and the pivot on which the system turns is the personal collection of rents , bv the managers. . - ' 'The Marquess of Salisbury explained to the annual meeting held recently ir. the Liverpool Town Hall over which the Lord Mavor. Lawrence D. - Holt,, presided, his reasons for puttiafr'so much of his property into the society's care After the war he had thrown upon his hands through the falling in of leases a large amount of house pro-. perty, which he was quite conscious was "not lit for habitation, and which, he had to find some means of restoring to a standard which public opinion, as well as himself, could approve of. In a city like Liverpool there was no posxbilitv of the personal supervision of reconditioning which was possible in the countrv. "lie had heard of Octavia Hill and he realised that the Liverpool Improved Housing Society embodied her ideas and ideals. Economics, said Lord Salisbury, were essential to the solution of tue problem. He hud tried letting people off their rents. But that caused a sort of universal demoralisation, and he came to the conclusion that such a plan was very bad. He did not mean that the landlord should take no notice of a tenant's misfortunes or of anytiling else which appealed to one's compassion. But, broadly speaking, he ought to manage his property on business lines. And that, he found, was the way in which this society work**!, and he recommended them as an efficient substitute for the landlord doing Ins own work in difficult circumstances. Decent housing conditions, said the chairman of the society, J. L. W Villains, had been given to about 40b persons bv the society, and the expense was no more than a hale over £3OO per house. _. The society is now the owner of -S cottages and two large houses in the centre of Liverpool. It buys poor property not bad enough to be condemned tv'tlu- sanitary authorities, which, when it comes into the market, often falls into the hands of a poor class of

speculator; whose chief concern is to -et. a large return on his money and to.' spend as little as possible on repairs' and improvements. It aires at helping the poorest tenants, left in the overcrowded districts, where „ the>r needs have hardly been touched "by noWie effort, and the e -ldition of the -routes has become wi • - ; rather than better daring the last tan years. And one of its objects is "to improve this sort of property with very little or no increase of rents.