A War Memorial for Belfast. 15 



housing, good, bad and indifferent, could easily have been'added 

 to : but the principle involved is the vital point, and this principle 

 can hardly be better stated than in Mr. Raymond Unwin's 

 diagram, Fig. 18, in which we can read very plainly the reason 

 why the official improvements made just before the war are so 

 very little in advance of the slums which they replaced. 



Cost. At this stage, it may well be asked, how is all this 

 going to be paid for 1 Obviously, it would l)e a very costly 

 business. I take it that the expense would be borne partly by 

 the State, partly by the Municipality, partly by private enter- 

 prise. As regards the State, already a huge scheme of national 

 Housing is afoot in Parliament, involving the erection of anything 

 up to a million new houses. Belfast will, of course, have its 

 share of these. As regards private enterprise, the evils we hope 

 to cure have been so largely the result of uncontrolled private 

 enterprise that our aim will probably l)e to supervise its activities 

 and check its natural lust after cheap buildings and high rents, 

 rather than to hand over another generation of our people to a 

 fresh group of jerry-builders. But as regards the Municipality, 

 there is one surprising and hopeful possibility. City develop- 

 ment, on the lines here indicated, could, to a very large 

 extent, be made to pay for itself, assuming that the City 

 tvill adopt a very broad and far-seeing policy. The 

 essential point of this policy is that the City should own, or 

 conti-ol the ownership of, all the unoccu}tJed building land which 

 could possibly be utilised for thirty or foi'ty years ahead. The 

 manner of obtaining such ownership or control would be to buy — or 

 take options to buy — at the official figures which are now recorded 

 in connection with the Land Values Taxation clauses of the 1909 

 Budget. If necessary, compulsory powers, to acquire land and 

 options at these prices, would not be hard to obtain from Parlia- 

 ment. Let the City begin to buy up its own edges and outskirts, 

 at least 1,000 acres to start with, and let it obtain options over 

 other portions, so large that come what may, it will never be 

 possiljlc for priA'ate speculators to stop or check the development 



