Rents, two rooms, 2/9 to 3/6; three rooms, 3/9 to 4/6; Roof available as an open space and drying ground. The cost of building averaged about £63 per room and £63 per 1,000 cubic feet of room space. The rent actually collected was equal to 87 per cent. of the gross rental for the years 1902-6, but improved to 92 per cent. for the year 1906, when £2,542 was collected out of £2,751. Working expenses were £1,202, including a special outlay of £185 for external painting, and the net receipts were £1,340 in respect of a building outlay of £42,033, equivalent to 3 1-5th per cent. If the actual cost of the land be included the return would probably be only 1 per cent. or even less. The Eldon Street Concrete Slab dwellings (app. 101 Housing Handbook), are not the cheap buildings they were expected to be. They cost £4,032 for building, instead of £1,230 as estimated, but this was largely due to experimental conditions. ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL RESULTS. The following figures should be valuable as showing the very heavy losses and expenses that accompany schemes where houses erected on cleared areas are reserved for and occupied by the poorest and worst class of tenants : Dividing the totals of each column by the first column it will be seen that the provision of one room on a Liverpool slum area is accompanied by an outlay of £70 for building, with a rental of £4 per annum or 1/6 per week; and that the Corporation spends annually on each room for rates and taxes 13/6; insurance 8d. ; lighting 3/2; management 3/-; repairs 9/6, or a total for working expenses of £1 10s. per room per annum, and that there is a loss of 14/- per room in empties and arrears. This gives a net annual return of only £1 16s. per room per annum, and entails an annual cost to the rates of about £30,000 or 2d. in the £ The loss on building for the dispossessed is estimated at about d. in the £ on the rates. It may therefore be said that reckoning the land at its full value the rents are subsidised to the extent of 2/6 per room per week, while if the building cost only is reckoned, the subsidy is about 7d. per room per week. |