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118
decided to deal with in 1928 still awaits completion.
The Digby Street areas, represented to the Borough
Council in 1929, were not proceeded with owing to
adverse legal decisions elsewhere. They were again
represented to the Borough Council in 1933 and are
now in process of development.
RENT AND TRANSPORT.
The Housing problem is so intimately bound up
with the economic position of the residents in the
borough that no consideration of housing reform can
ignore the prime importance of rent. At present the
most extraordinary anomalies exist. An unemployed
worker with a large family may live in one or two
rooms, the rent of which may be anything from 4/or
7/- to 6/6 or 10/- according to whether the house
is decontrolled or not. In either event, the hope of
improved housing for the family is remote because of
the man's inability to fulfil the required rent standards
of the Borough Council or L.C.C., and because no
private landlord will take him. At the other extreme
there are a few cases where a family with grown up
children is still living at a comparatively low rental in
the one or two roomed tenement in which they were
born, with a collective income sufficient to rent
adequate accommodation but unwilling to move. In
between are the more typical cases of families with
breadwinners earning low wages, a disproportionate
part of which is already going in rent, and whose
prospects of securing better housing are very small
because either the rent for adequate accommodation
near the workplace is too high or the fares to a house
of lower rental are too great to enable them to take
advantage of such accommodation. The heavy cost
of transit from home to workplace is another factor
to which insufficient attention has been paid. Where
the income is limited, any undue expenditure on rent
or travelling must come out of the food supply. This
direct relation between housing, transport and lack of
proper food is a matter to which special consideration
needs to be given.