TOPICS OF THE DAY.
HOUSES, HOUSES, AND AGAIN HOUSES.
WE confess to a sense of deep disappointment over the Housing Scheme unfolded by Mr. Wheatley in the House of Commons on Tuesday. It was sincerely meant, but it will not provide the houses of which we are in such desperate need. It will make worse, not better, the economic morass into which the building trade has fallen, or, at any rate, that part of the building trade in which private enterprise has been destroyed and yet in which Socialistic principles have not come into action. As Captain Elliot said, it will not produce extra houses, though the throwing in of extra money will produce a rising cost which will finally knock out private enterprise and will thus prejudice, instead of helping, the objects which we all have in mind—the provision of houses for the people. " But," it will be urged, " if our scheme won't do, present us with an alternative. Your objections will not put roofs over people's heads." Such criticism is, we admit, to the point. We are not merely tired—we are made desperate—by people talking and ranting and cursing each other about houses while the houses are not being built. Jones raves about houses, but no walls rise. Smith hints houses, but not a pick goes into the ground to dig the foundations. Robinson analyzes houses. Stokes draws up tables of subsidies. Nokes grows rhapsodical over sinking funds and terms of years—but nothing happens.
Our view of the whole matter is so pathetically plain that we hardly dare to set it down. It is that we shall not get the houses we need except by building more of them, and we shall not get more houses unless we have more people ready and willing to build them and also provide a greater store of material. And again, we shall not get the houses if we let ourselves be frightened by the bogies either of the Capitalists or of the Trade Unions. It is folly to let ourselves be frightened by the thought of the dreadful things that may happen when the houses are built and the extra men employed to build them will be thrown out of work, or by the thought that the money spent on building will bring the nation to bankruptcy. Those who talk with bated breath about, the dangers seem to forget that there are other and even greater dangers in doing nothing. If we do not get the people of this country properly housed, we shall soon have conditions here which will not merely cause, but justify, revolution.
Even if we find the expense of getting out of the slough into which Mr. Lloyd George led us by his Land Taxation proposals (for that is the original fount of trouble) an appalling burden, we shall get into far worse financial difficulties through attempting to live upon such nostrums as Rent Restriction Acts.
We are individualists and supporters of the principles of Free Exchange, but in the situation in which we find ourselves we are prepared to advocate direct State action in the way of building. We would create a Housing Commission, not for talk or inquiry, but for the direct and immediate building of emergency houses. The first thing that the Commission would have to do would be to recruit workers, and to recruit them from the unemployed and not by drawing them away from, the normal and commercial building trade. What we propose is not dilution, but the calling to the colours of industry the hundred thousand men or more by which the Workers' Houses Industry is now short. But how are they to be trained ? Our answer is : Proceed, as we did in the War, by assuming that except in certain special crafts training in the strict sense is unnecessary, We have designedly spoken of " emergency houses " because we want the work to be done as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Therefore we would not build the houses in brick, or even in concrete, but as a rule in wood. And we would have them built to a standard pattern in which fresh air, warmth and comfort would be thought of more than beauty. We would have the doors and windows of a standard size, turned out by machinery, as would also be the framework of the houses, in order that they might be very quickly put together, not on brick, but on concrete foundations. Any man can quickly learn to pour concrete.
Such a proposal as this will, of course, fill all the lovers of the beautiful, the decent, and the appropriate with anxiety. " You are proposing to degrade both town and country with horrible hutments." Well, suppose we are. It is better than letting the country remain filled with horrible slums or with houses crowded to such an extent that life in them becomes a torment, better than submitting to so grave a shortage of comfortable houses that the young people cannot marfy. We shall further be asked " Where are your hideous emergency houses to be dumped ? " Personally, we should like to put them up in the most conspicuous places possible, so that they should act as a kind of memento mori to the people of this country. We would welcome them in our parks and public pleasure grounds so that the passers by would say : " Let us get rid of those enormities by building more seemly houses elsewhere."
And now as to the ways in which the Housing Commis.
sion of our thought should put up these emergency houses. We would adopt as a war measure—we are at war with the house famine—something in the nature of a resort to Guild Socialism, though only a local and temporary resort. We would raise building companies, say of a hundred men each, with foremen and managers, and these companies, or rather guilds, would be encouraged to take on contracts with the Commissioners to erect groups of houses wherever there was an urgent demand. It might be part of the scheme for them to build first their own houses in, say, ten or twelve centres, from which they would be dispatched to da their work elsewhere. The Government houses could be either sold to the municipalities en bloc, or else let directly by the Government at 10s. a week in the towns and at 6s. a week in the country. That might, considering the present price of timber, be a feasible proposition ; but even if it were not, it certainly would not be so expensive as the Wheatley proposals.
We. have assumed for the sake of the argument that these emergency houses, which we want put up at once at the rate of at least two hundred and fifty thousand a year, would be hideous and would provoke the people of this country to make a further building effort to get rid of them. But there is really no reason why they should be hideous. Anyone who has travelled, in Norway and Sweden, or America, or Canada, knows that very pleasant- looking small houses can be built of wood. Nay, more. Wooden houses can be not only seemly but durable, as anybody may discover by walking through the villages of Essex, Surrey and Kent. Finally, we would not eonfine our Building Commissioners to wood. Let them build also in other cheap materials.
Above all, let us not make housing a ground for party combats. Why should not Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Asquith go to the Prime Minister and say, " Let us rub the whole matter off the party slate and make houses just as we made shells, as .a way of saving the country " ?
J. ST. Lou STRACHEY.-
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