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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 25, No. 6. 1962.

[introduction]

Put the case of a city already short of hotel accommodation, this city being centrally situated in a country where the tourist trade is likely to expand.

Put the case of a city, a university city, which is short of accommodation for its students. The university is in the centre of the city and any land nearby is too valuable to put merely into lodgings and hostels which do not pay their way.

This is not Wellington alone, but also Copenhagen and Stockholm. It was in Scandinavia that somebody first put together the needs of students for the nine months of the academic year and the needs of tourists for the three months of the Summer Season and realised that they were complementary. A hotel might be built which is also a hostel, a hostel which was also a hotel. Moreover the tariff paid by the summer guests would subsidize the rent of students for the rest of the year. From the students' point of view it would mean obtaining first-class living quarters in private rooms for the normal rent of a flat. And the whole concern would even pay its way; not only would it return the maintenance costs but also the capital investment. For the university there was the relief of finding a way to lodge students who lived outside the city without committing a penny of university funds. Instead of going to wait upon the government, hat in hand, for a loan or a subsidy to build hostels at so many unrecoverable thousands of pounds per bed and finding in austere days previous little response, the university could put the proposition to private investors that they might raise a fine building for students as a civic venture — and get their money back.

Well it has been done in Scandinavia. Now, as a student or a tourist, you have the choice of living in the 'Domus and the Jerum in Stockholm, the Hotel Volrat Tham in Gotenberg, the Studentbergen Soga in Oslo, the Alrek in Bergen or, in Copenhagen, the Egmont, the Solbakken and Otto Monsteds Hotel Minerva. They have been variously financed. Some of them came originally from private foundations and trust funds. But in Amsterdam I visited a hostel in its last stages of construction, about to admit students for the first time at the beginning of the academic year in September, and it has been built, ten million Dutch guilders worth, with only such means as would be available in New Zealand. There is not a penny of government money in the building; to have awaited it would have meant postponing the project indefinitely. But the government agreed to stand guarantor to a third of the loan which meant that more favourable terms could be got by the non-profit organisation of three men which has been raising the money.

There are seven or eight storeys of the Casa Academica. It has a long gracious facade and a view from its hundreds of windows of all of the city of Amsterdam. It has a restaurant and a coffee bar on the ground floor which will be open to the public and will actually run at a profit all the year round, but where students may eat at reduced rates. The rooms upstairs impressed me most. They have been built along corridors, because corridors are economical, but each set of four doors has its own private bay which is wider than the rest of the corridor and separately lit. Inside there is a room or a unit of two rooms, self-contained, with its own "wet cell."