The Making of a Good White - E-thesis - Helsinki.fi

the time Verwoerd was vastly influenced by the American professor C.W.
Coulter, who represented the American sociology in the Carnegie Commission
(Miller 1993: 642-643). Batson, who was critical of the Carnegie
Commission, otherwise approved of a social scientific approach. It can
thus be safely said that in the early years, all the CHL founders aimed
towards the same goal: creating a system of scientifically guided social
work.
In the 1950s and 1960s the CHL grew into a vast organisation with a
dozen areas with more than 10.000 housing units under its management.
In 1969 the Company had property worth 12 million Rand, 99 and it took
care of an array of tasks. It was not only making dwellings available for
poor whites, but also looking after the aged, building houses for sale,
providing social services and running several subsidiary companies such
as the Utility Trading Company and the Utility Pharmacy Limited and the
Utility Construction Company.
In the 1950s and 1960s the apartheid urban politics began to influence
the CHL’s actions. While the CHL was very critical of the apartheid government’s
housing regulations in their official 1970 report, they would
have to obey. They furthermore built coloured townships, constantly
demanding the right to build other than what Zerilda Steyn had once bitterly
called the “cramped and cheerless structures” on which the National
Housing Board insisted. (CHL Review 1970: 19.)
By the end of the 1960s, CHL had grown to be such a vast establishment
that the power over the residents’ everyday life had been gradually
transferred almost totally for the professionals working in the suburbs.
The directors had more urgent matters to attend to than interfering with
the details of running a housing scheme, and the archival findings reveal
that their direct personal involvement gradually diminished.
However, in the 1930s and 1940s, things were still different. From
their head quarters in the SANTAM building in Wale Street, the board of
directors not only set the policy and aims for the CHL, but also decided
in detail on the building of the housing schemes, and how they were run.
They chose the inhabitants from prospective tenants as well as undertaking
the supervision of the social workers’ professional standards. In the
middle of the nation-building fever in 1930, the board of directors made a
decision to build Epping Garden Village for poor whites.
99 At the time, a high school teacher earned approximately 2.500 Rand per year.
110