Only The Rats Want To Stay

Almost a third of the people aged 15 to 29 interviewed in a housing survey conducted in central Wellington are forced to remain in accommodation they do not like.

While 22.8 percent said they had no choice of alternative accommodation, eight percent said they could not afford better. Only five percent live where they do because they want to.

"One of the main reasons for young peoples' dissatisfaction with their accommodation was its condition," says Mr Bradley. The survey has already shown that over 90 percent of the rented dwellings that the inhabitants were dissatisfied with had structural defects or some basic amenity missing Young peoples gross dissatisfaction with their present accommodation is understandable when you remember that they occupy over three quarters (77.2 percent) of all the rented dwellings covered in the survey. Only 5.2 percent of the young people interviewed wanted to remain in their present accommodation. Just over 15 percent remained there because the rent was cheap while 38.6 said they stayed their present accommodation because it was convenient. The young people (defined as those aged between 15 and 29 inclusive) number 878 or 48.5 percent of the total 1,851 people living in the 512 dwellings covered in the survey. They included manual, office, and technical workers, those in managerial and professional positions, and just under a sixth were students at Wellington secondary and tertiary institutions.

Commenting on the survey results, the chairman of the Wellington Citizens Committee on Accommodation, Tim Dyce, said housing in Wellington city did not cater adequately for the needs of young people, and was a factor in creating social problems among the young. "The mobility of youth is a fact we have to live with. More and more young people are leaving country areas to search for better employment opportunities in the city, and to cope with the challenge of a different life here. This does not absolve the city from ensuring that the housing it is providing is a sufficiently healthy environment for these young people to grow up in.

"If we permit the continuance, or further creation of, ghetto areas where both bad housing and young people predominate, then we must bear the consequences as a community. From several individual cases I know, I believe that substandard housing in the central city area has contributed, and is contributing, to such activities as drug abuse and an unhealthy lack of respect for property," said Mr Dyce.

"A broken-down damp house with structural defects such as dry rot and broken windows is not the kind of living quarters people need in the city, which for many, is unfriendly and alien after their transition from smaller cities and towns. "Depressing environment, added to other factors, encourage various forms of resentment against or escape from society. The manifestation of such attitudes in violence and drug abuse hit the headlines and arouse public outrage, but too few people are getting to the root causes. Still fewer are doing anything about them," Mr Dyce said. L'

Overcrowding was another problem young people had to face. In a survey published in June this year it was shown that the number of people per house in Wellington was 3.15 But in the houses surveyed by Mr Bradley, young adults were at an occupancy rate of 4.3 to a house. One of the causes of overcrowding is the need to pack extra people in flats to pay rent. In cases where these young people are students, overcrowding can have a bad effect on their studies, particularly as study space at university is becoming overcrowded.

One of the solutions to the problems of young peoples accommodation in Wellington is a housing trust, mooted by the WCCA.

If the community supports the Housing Trust, hopefully to be launched by the end of the year, one of its early priorities should be to provide clean, sound accommodation for young workers and students.