City Housing: Ii. The Problem at Home

II. THE PROBLEM AT HOME

IN the war-office of the modern city, headquarters of the fight for health, for housing, and for like reform, hang campaign maps, whose tints expose the strongholds of the foe. Study one of them for a space. On streets beneath that bar of crimson rages a fell disease. There, below that spot of blue, another holds its sway. That smear of yellowcovers a district where the victims of a third are dying by the score. There is but little color in the suburbs. There the white background of the map shows many a district clear. Look toward the centre of the city. As your eye runs inward, note how the stains group closer and closer together. They are deep upon the slum.

The close connection between the slum and disease is too patent for question. Some of the tuberculosis exhibits show an intermittent incandescent light burning on the wall. Twice every minute it flames and fades. Above it a placard reads: “A human being dies from tuberculosis each time this light goes out.” Yet tuberculosis is but one of the diseases that flourish rankly in the slum. Twenty years ago Dr. Russell of Glasgow presented figures on the relation between the deathrate and overcrowding, with a brevity and clarity which have scarcely been surpassed since. He divided the families of the whole city of Glasgow into three classes. In families occupying oneand two-room houses, 27.74 died out of every thousand. In families occupying threeand four-room houses, 19.45 died out of every thousand. In families living in houses of five rooms or more, 11.23 died out of every thousand. Broadly speaking, these figures mean this: that for every two mortals who died in Glasgow houses open to sun and air, and in which overcrowding did not exist, five died in the slums. Life is hard for the slum-dwellers, but our modern cities make it easy for them to die.

Conditions are hard for the adult. They are much harder for the child. St. Mary’s, in Birmingham, is less than four miles from the model village of Bourneville. 331 infants die out of every thousand born in the crowded city ward. 65 die out of every thousand born in Bourneville. In that favored village, every child who comes into the world has more than five times the chance of life that the wretched scraps of humanity of crowded St. Mary’s possess.

We have spoken of the slum as a culture-medium for disease. To how slight an extent that is a figure of speech the records given above may show in part. Take the crusade against tuberculosis, for example. No campaign was ever fought more bitterly, and yet authorities tell us that this disease can never be stamped out until we disintegrate the crowded masses of the city. The prison of the state and the prison of the slum are our two most overcrowded centres to-day. According to Dr. Knopf, mortality from tuberculosis among prisoners is three times as high as it is among the general population. Next to the prisons in providing fertile soil for the growth of this disease comes the chief home of the American workman, the tenement house.

The old crone in the doorway, peering through the watching group, exclaimed, “Seventeen,” as the coffin came down the steps into brighter sunlight than its occupant had ever known in his dark, unclean, ill-ventilated home. “Eight families, and this the seventeenth brought out from that door. God be good to us, but it’s a haunted house! " She crossed herself as I passed on, noting the number and street. The woman spoke the truth.

The reason why houses are haunted by the dread plague of tuberculosis lies open to all who know the lack of space, air, and light in the slum. Poor is the air of those streets. Poor as it is, the windows are stuffed with rags and paper to keep it out through all the winter months. Slight is the amount of sun which reaches over the high roofs of the tenement houses and falls upon the cloudy panes. Slight as that is, there are many rooms where sunlight never penetrates. New York alone has more than one hundred thousand living-rooms which are absolutely without windows, and nearly three hundred thousand without sufficient light or sunhine; while more than twenty-five thousand New York families live in cellars. These facts are so horrible that comment becomes superfluous.

Our foreign critics have a habit of referring to us as a nation whose hearts can best be reached through the pocketbook. Whether that charge is true or not, there is no question that he who can show a saving to the taxpayer offers one of the strongest arguments that can be advanced in favor of any reform. The Committee on Congestion of Population in New York, in the course of its investigations, has been taking up an analysis of the budget of the city in an attempt definitely to ascertain the economic cost to taxpayer and rent-payer of such congestion as now exists, and of the lack of a city plan. The committee divides its research into ten parts. Some of its conclusions follow.

Preventable disease has cost New York from thirty-seven to forty-one millions of dollars a year for the last four years; $166,248,408.24 is the total estimate of the wealth poured out in these four years for wasteful pain and suffering. For millions of that great total the tenement house is directly responsible. If we could only have that money for playgrounds, for the renewing of the city! Remember that those millions represent a steady drain on the community as a whole, that your prosperity depends on the prosperity of your own city and of other cities, and that such constant leakage must affect you individually; and you will read the pages which follow with a new intensity of interest.

The golden dreams of the immigrant turning for freedom and help to our shore, to that great “ Melting Pot” of which Mr. Zangwill has written, are doomed to some disappointment. Too often, disappointment is a tragic certainty. Suppose a little band of immigrants from some continental village start on the ever new discovery of the west. The entrance to this country must raise their hopes. If they come on one of the newer steamers, thanks to federal law, more space, light, and air, more healthful surroundings, are granted to the incomer on shipboard than the municipality will assure him when he reaches land. The incoming human wave which breaks upon our shores sends its scattered spray to many cities. Too little reaches the country. Too much stays in the city slum. It is entirely natural that this should be the case, and that the entering foreigner should seek a dwelling in some locality where his own tongue sounds kindly to his ears. So the Italian, at whatever port he lands, hastens to Little Italy, the Russian seeks Little Russia, and the Hungarian finds lodging in Little Hungary. Division of this sort makes housing problems in the United States more complex than those with which many European cities have to deal. Model tenements here cannot receive tenants chosen at random in the same fashion as Berlin or London. Difference of race and type, even difference of locality, forbids; for the Italian of the North must have his quarters separate from the Italian of the South, and one tribe from that strange mixture of races called the Russian nation may be the ancient enemy of another.

Evidently our attack on this problem must include some selective processes. Before we can consider general or special methods, however, we must know something of the conditions which surround us. Laying aside for a time those vexing questions raised by such a conglomeration of types as inhabit our slums, let us see what quarters the little band of immigrants is apt to find if, as might well happen, each unit of the group is bound to some one of our great cities. Tracing the steps of each wandering family, we find that one stops at the gateway, in New York, two turn north, to Hartford and Boston, three others south, to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, while the rest push onward to the West, to Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis.

The family which stops in New York City stands the least chance of a happy and healthy life. In 1905, the state census reported one hundred and twenty-two blocks of that city with a density of seven hundred and fifty or more per acre, and thirty blocks with a density of one thousand or more, spread over the whole of Manhattan Island. Since 1905, hundreds of those houses have been made higher by from one to four stories, and the total number per acre has risen in some cases to sixteen or seventeen hundred. The somewhat uncommon density of one thousand to the acre, of 1905, has become a common occurrence.

What does a density of one thousand per acre mean to you, reading this article in your own home? Assume that you are in a suburban house with a lot sixty by seventy-two feet. That means ten houses to the acre. Think of the ten houses immediately around you and see whether they will average more than six persons to each house. If not, there is a density of sixty to an acre. If you are reading this in a four-story apartment house standing on a lot whose total area is three thousand feet, and in which every apartment contains an average of five persons, you are taking your part in producing a density of population of about two hundred and ninety to the acre. In both these cases density is figured exclusive of streets and open spaces. When these are included, conditions become worse. Even the conditions cited are too crowded. What is the result when you place a thousand or fifteen hundred people where there is scarcely room for three hundred? To-day in New York there is acre after acre on which thirteen hundred persons live their crowded lives; where there are ten persons to every seven rooms; where, instead of the minimum of from eight hundred to a thousand cubic feet, there are but four hundred feet of air for each adult, and but two hundred for a child; where only one room out of four receives direct sunlight. Under such conditions the immigrant who stops in New York stands but little chance of length of days.

In its crowded districts New York presents one more example of that unfortunate state of affairs where the poor man, living on land which is far too expensive for dwellings, is forced into narrow quarters from the compelling exigency of a narrow purse. Over and over again one truism appears. House your laborer on expensive land and you will have overcrowding, because his wage will pay for but a little space. House him on cheap land and the money which bought four walls before will buy a home. The dumb-bell tenement (sometimes called the doubledecker), into whose darkened doorway our immigrant is likely to pass, is unsurpassed for wretchedness in any great city of the world. Strange to say, it is an example of ill-directed reform.

In December, 1878, after a spasm of housing interest in New York, prizes were offered for plans of the best model tenement house that could be secured. To the horror of thousands at that time, and of hundreds of thousands since, the dumb-bell tenement was awarded the first prize. From 1879 to 1901 city block after city block was filled solidly with these buildings. Mistakenly advised as a model plan to builders who knew no better, fulfilling every purpose of the man who was ready to exploit human lives for money, the dumb-bell tenement is responsible for an appalling roll of deaths, and for an extraordinary waste of efficiency. Its name is derived from the fact that it narrows in the centre and expands at the ends, like a huge dumb-bell, and its expansion fills the street both front and rear. Its narrowed centre gives room for that misnamed feature, the air-shaft. That shaft has been variously called a garbage-hole, a dirt-trap, an ash-bin, and a destroyer of privacy. It has never proved its right to the name of air-shaft. Without an intake at the bottom, how long would any chimney draw? The air-shaft is like a chimney without an intake. It is but one of the evils of the dumb-bell. Seven stories high, with four rooms in the front apartment; with three rooms in the back; with one room of the front apartment open to the street, and one room of the rear apartment opening on twenty feet or so of back yard; with inside rooms facing on an air-shaft whose wall is less than five feet away from the windows of the next house: these are some of the characteristics of the habitations which house a large portion of the citizens of the greatest city of the Western Hemisphere.

The building of the dumb-bell tenement was stopped in 1901, and regulations providing for the erection of new-law tenements, with large courts designed to provide natural light and ventilation for every room in the house, were made. No window was to open within twelve feet of any other window. The practical results of this law have hardly equaled its theoretical possibilities. In October, 1908, the Committee of One Hundred held a Citizens’ Exhibit showing conditions in New York under Tammany. One of the placards on the wall read as follows: —

THERE ARE IN NEW YORK APPROXIMATELY 300,000 LIVING-ROOMS WITHOUT ADEQUATE LIGHT AND VENTILATION. ONLY ONE IN FOUR OF THE ROOMS IN THE NEW-LAW TENEMENTS HAS ADEQUATE SUNSHINE. ON MAY 1, 1909, THERE WERE 16,006 OLD BUILDING VIOLATIONS SLEEPING IN THE CORPORATION COUNSEL’S OFFICE. 1563 CASES WERE OVER 4 YEARS OLD. 2283 CASES HAD BEEN NEGLECTED ONE YEAR. 4578 CASES HAD BEEN NEGLECTED OVER 6 MONTHS. THERE WERE 35,000 VIOLATIONS OF THE TENEMENT-HOUSE LAW ON THE BOOKS OF THE TENEMENTHOUSE DEPARTMENT. BLAME TAMMANY FOR THESE CONDITIONS. AND FOR YOUR HEALTH’S SAKE —

VOTE TAMMANY OUT !

No part of our group of immigrants is likely to suffer so greatly as the family that stopped at New York. The newcomers who came to Boston have a wider choice if they seek the suburbs, but they may find lodging in certain quarters of the city where conditions are fully as bad as any in the greater community. Those who live in the centre of the city must crowd into houses with but little more light and air than they would get in the dumb-bells of New York. The bovine street superintendents who are said to have first laid out Boston’s thoroughfares did a poor enough piece of work in the business quarters of the city. They did their worst in the old North End, where once the finest residences of the city overlooked the bay. Overcrowding is no better in the lower houses of Boston than in the higher ones of New York. There are 1672 persons on an acre in fiveand six-story houses in New York. There are 1143 persons on an acre in threeand four-story houses in the North End of Boston.

If one could imagine the head of a family which goes West studying the figures which tell of congestion of population, Chicago, with its average density of only 21.09 to the acre, would seem a free and open city for him to choose. Those figures, however, are most misleading. The city of Chicago contains 122,011 acres within its limits. Thousands of these acres are but sparsely settled. Tens, almost hundreds, of them in the centre of population are either overcrowded or on the edge of overcrowding. Congestion in Chicago is developing with amazing rapidity. In an investigation of six selected blocks, one-half had three persons to every room, one-fourth had two persons to every room. That means that if two rooms are occupied by four people, all four are commonly in the bedroom at night. Such overcrowding is not all. Add to it the tendency to cover eighty or ninety per cent of the whole lot with dwellings, and the chance of air and light grows small indeed.

St. Louis gives no great promise to the newcomer. In an investigation recently carried on by the Civic League of that city, one-half the houses in the Negro quarter were declared unfit for human habitation. The Polish quarter had an average of thirteen persons to four rooms, and a number of lots were found which were wholly covered by buildings. Cleveland reports that one-third of all the buildings in one of its slum districts should not be permitted to exist. Philadelphia, the vaunted “City of Homes,” specializes in one-room “housekeeping apartments,” where whole families, often containing from four to seven members, eat, sleep, cook, and live, in a single room. Buffalo presents a Polish quarter, whose buildings are chiefly small, individual, wooden houses, seldom more than two and a half stories high. This city offers an interesting proof of the fact that overcrowding is not synonymous with high brick tenements. In its frame houses live thousands of Poles who crowd together like bees in a hive. Two, three, four, five, even six and seven families gather under the same roof in small houses whose space is no more than sufficient for a single family. Such buildings, however, have one great advantage over the ordinary tenement: they are open to the air.

In both Baltimore and Washington the alley problem is the most pressing evil. Alley-house and rear tenement alike offer one great barrier to correction: they are out of the public eye. Sanitary reform is difficult behind a sheltering screen, and it has no more active agent than publicity.

Much of the necessary body of building regulation has been outlined by American and foreign experiment. It seems an absurdly evident proposition that the area of air-shafts and courts should increase in proportion to the height of the building. Even a child, building a playhouse in a pasture, will enlarge its area as the rock wall goes higher. Even a child has wisdom enough to see that the higher wall will cut off sunshine from the ground within, if the space be narrow, and that his room will be damp and cold in consequence. The child, in carrying out his building operations, shows more intelligence than the combined wisdom of many municipal departments displays. They have not yet awakened to the fact that every additional story of a building, rising into air, necessitates larger open spaces on the ground. Back-to-back tenements, which quite forbid “through” ventilation, may still be built in many cities. Lots may be wholly covered with buildings. Rear tenements may be placed behind front tenements; and when, as in the case of New York, houses are built originally at the back of a lot with a front garden, the march of building movement may fdl such garden spaces with brick and mortar.

General sanitary regulations for general needs may be made which can cover any city; yet local conditions, topographical and sociological, must determine local laws. The twenty-five foot lot binds New York to a definite procedure. The desire of tenants in many quarters to have one room open on the street makes impracticable in this country some of the inner courtyard plans which have been successful abroad. The longing for street windows is probably due to the fascinations of the unfailing picture-show of the city street, which seems never to weary the observers who, with elbows crossed upon the sills, crowd their casements for hours. Give them far greater measure of convenience in other ways, give them double window-space, opening on a courtyard, and they will still long for the sights and sounds of the street. Moreover, the intangible chains of social procedure are powerful in the tenements. In many districts the occupant of a rear tenement with no outlook on the street is considered the social inferior of the occupant of a precisely similar apartment with street frontage, though situated on the same floor.

Among the more general housing regulations, there are two for which the city is especially responsible, the municipal water-service, and protection against fire. That such primary necessities of existence as water-closets should be used in common by whole tenement houses is one of the burning shames of our community life. There are numerous tenement houses to-day in which water has never been put above the first floor. Imagine shopping without an elevator, and then think of the weariness of those long flights to tired women and little children. Even where water is carried to every floor, a common water-closet and a common sink often supply the needs of four apartments, which may house from eight to twelve whole families, to say nothing of lodgers. In the slums, as too often in apartment houses far from the slums, the water-closet ventilates on an air-shaft used also to ventilate bedrooms. In still other cases the water-closet is placed directly in the bedroom. Manchester, England, requires that every room used for such purposes must have a window opening on the outside air, with an area of at least one foot by two. Detroit requires that the water-closet compartment be open to the outer air, or be ventilated by a shaft which is not used for ventilating any inhabited room. Several cities demand that no water-closet shall be placed in yard or cellar. Some of the most enlightened have reached the point of requiring one for each family or each separate apartment. In general the infamous “school sinks " and other cheap substitutes for modern plumbing are forbidden. Violations of these ordinances, however, like those of many other laws made for the protection of the city’s health, are far too common.

That cleanliness is not a necessity of existence has been proved by the slums for many years. It is a forbidden luxury to most of them. That it is necessary for healthful life few will deny. The way to provide opportunities for cleanliness to the houses of the poor is by no means settled, but the great mass of opinion is on the side of the individual set-tub. Nor need the tubs be confined to the washing of clothes. A movable partition and stout supports improvise a bath-tub which, although scarcely as convenient as a porcelain one, is by no means to be despised when space and cost must be considered. If clothes are to be washed, it is practically a choice between the coöperative laundry, to be used in common by all tenants,and the individual set-tub, and the coöperative method has shown one interesting example of failure which hardly encourages its adoption.

The coöperative laundry built by the London County Council for their Boundary Street Buildings, at an expense of over fifty thousand dollars, has never, from the first, proved a success. The tenants will not wash in public where their neighbors can see and criticise the quantity, quality, and appearance of their clothes. There appears to be no objection to hanging out the clothes to dry in a common space after they are washed, but the preliminaries must be attended to in private.

I have seen one tenement-house fire. I hope I may never see another. It was an object-lesson which makes the heading, “Another Tenement-House Fire. Two Lives Lost,” a real and vital thing which overshadows even politics and the financial page. And it is such a common heading! How common was shown vividly by the investigation of Hugh Bonner and Lawrence Veiller, a few years ago, on the relation between tenement houses and fire. All the records of fires which occurred throughout the city during a period of two years and a half were examined, to determine the type of buildings in which most of the fires occurred. Sixty thousand records were searched, to determine the general method of the spread of fires in tenement houses. Nearly one-half of the total fires, during the period chosen, occurred in tenement houses, although this type of house comprised but thirty-seven per cent of the total buildings of the city. Fortytwo per cent of all the buildings of the city at that time were dwellings holding not more than two families, yet such dwellings furnished only fourteen per cent of the total. The way in which the flames spread in the cases of serious tenement-house fires shows how much destruction and loss of life is due to construction. Twenty-six per cent of all such fires spread through the airshaft; five per cent through the airshaft combined with the halls and stairs; twenty-four per cent through flooring or partitions; twenty per cent through halls and stairs. One-fourth of all the fires started in the cellar. From these figures we may obtain an indication of the lines which should be followed in setting the tenements free from this scourge.

Fireproofing throughout is, of course, the ideal solution of the fire problem. But it is very doubtful if it is practical in the tenements. Construction of this sort is so expensive that its general application would mean a rise in rents and a consequent diminishing of other necessities, which would make conditions worse than they have been. The analysis of Bonner and Veiller just cited shows three points which need especial protection — the stairs, the hallways, and the shafts.

Even if those points have been guarded, however, enough has not been done. Interior egress is not sufficient. Exterior egress also should be provided. In only too many cities, the laws which require adequate fire-escapes have been systematically ignored. Only too often, when escapes have been raised, they have been wholly inadequate for their purpose. At the time of the investigation just cited, there were approximately two thousand persons in one New York ward living in tenement houses wholly without fire-escapes. In the same district were many fire-escape balconies constructed of wood, which would burn out at the first blast of flame. Household goods and flowerpots blocked sudden egress in case of sudden fire. Many of the escapes were vertical ladders. A vertical ladder is safe enough for an active, powerful man; but the great majority of the inhabitants of a given tenement house is never composed of such men. How much chance do women and children have of gaining the ground whole and in safety by such means? Talk with the firemen, and they will tell you that a vertical-ladder fire-escape generally means that they must carry the women and children to the ground, while the conquest of the fire must be delayed. Sometimes the battle is lost because of that delay. Fire-escapes made wholly of metal, with stairs bordered by hand-railings, provide the only safe method of escape from the crowded dwellings of the slums.

The initiative in the movement for reform may come from single or collective forces. Private citizens can do much to aid. The wonderful work of the tuberculosis exhibits can be duplicated by good housing exhibitions prepared by societies interested in civic reform. Coöperative societies have fully as great a chance to build model houses here as in England, where so much has been accomplished. Capitalists, who desire to aid the poor by methods of self-help, may find work ready for their hands. Labor unions, which have done no small part of the whole work so far, can do much more. The greatest necessity of all is for a constant, persistent campaign of education.

After all the general work has been done, however, each individual city must find the values of the many unknown x’s of the housing problem, by the use of the known factors, the a’s and b’s, of its personal equation. It is entirely probable that the best way for municipalities or associations to take up this question is by means of a temporary committee or commission, whose membership should be made up in the way shown by the best foreign examples. Some of the governments abroad have obtained the services of experts in the six lines of work most closely connected with the housing problem. Their commissions include a doctor, an engineer, an architect, a real-estate expert, a builder, and a social worker. There are too many problems of disease, too many of construction and finance, and too many personal problems, for any one of those experts to be safely omitted.

Such a board would proceed immediately after its appointment to obtain the necessary facts and figures for its labors. A house-to-house canvass should be immediately begun, not only for the purpose of determining to what extent evil conditions exist, but also to find out what deficiency of housing exists in the city. While this canvass proceeds, a general investigation of the land in the slums and around the city should be undertaken, to determine what localities exist where inexpensive and easy means of transit makes access to work comparatively simple, and where land can be bought cheaply. The collection of data from American and foreign states, cities, and private enterprises, is important. Its arrangement and cataloguing in such shape as to make access easy is quite as necessary. Each of the specialists on the commission should report individually on his own line of work, and bear his part in the general statement to be issued by the whole commission. Experts should add to this such a digest of existing law as to make it evident, at the close of the house-to-house canvass, just what the law is and just how completely it has been enforced.

The assessors’ books provide a starting-point for housing investigations, since they are the register of houseproperty of every kind situated within the city limits. From these books may be learned what land is too costly for dwellings and what land is cheap enough to be used for this purpose. That point can scarcely receive too great an emphasis. If houses are to be available for the poor, rents must be so regulated as to meet the lowest average wage. To know the practicable rents for any city, the wage-statistics of that individual city, not the general statistics of a country, must be obtained. In no civic problem does the personal equation of a city affect the result more.

A second point follows naturally here. The regulations imposed on persons desiring to build must not be too costly. They must always seek to give t he maximum protection to health at the minimum cost. The desire for harmonious artistic development is most laudable. If it can be secured without hygienic loss, well and good; but when the beautiful and the healthful conflict, it is the æsthetic side which should suffer. There is no finer ornament to a city than healthy boys and girls.

One must hesitate a long time, however, before advocating the policies of Germany and Great Britain in toto in the United States. Municipal ownership of dwellings, which may be most successful under the autocratic rule of the first nation or the parliamentary control of the second, may be of dubious value here. The average municipal officer might be too hesitant in applying sufficiently rigorous methods of control to a tenant of city property who had helped in his election. The possibility of colonization in municipally owned dwellings would be too great. The danger that a man’s home would be used as a club to control his vote would not be small. The absence in America of distinctive social differences, such as make possible abroad houses intended exclusively for the poor, renders houses intended for any “class” of doubtful value here. However contented with his former lot the immigrant may have been, the air of this country soon leads him to hope and dream of advancement for his children, if not for himself.

Municipal housing considers but one phase of the question at best. There are many other ways in which municipalities can do much to encourage the building of good and inexpensive dwellings by individual citizens, coöperative societies, or associations.

The common practice of remitting taxes to manufacturers who are willing to increase the prosperity of a town by bringing new business within its limits, is a precedent for similar concessions to builders willing to put up model houses at low rents. The heavy cost of betterments, of sewer-opening, and of street-making, might be waived in the case of contractors willing to supply housing deficiencies under strict regulations. Such remissions should be charged to the builder, and waived only during his performance of the necessary conditions. On violation of the regulations or on the raising of rents above the stipulated sums, such charges should become automatically due. In the present competition of town with town, boards of trade are sending advertising matter all over the country in their effort to attract citizens and manufacturers. Could a board of trade offer a better drawing-card than a good town-plan? Could it furnish many greater incentives to a manufacturer than would be provided by well-planned houses for employees, houses that would make employers’ trouble from the constant change of help a negligible quantity? No organization in the city could better constitute such a commission, as has been previously suggested, than a board of trade. None could work more effectively in obtaining the backing of public-spirited citizens ready to further housing schemes.

The problem before us is immediately concerned with the provision of increased facilities of rapid transit. The London County Council in its Millbank buildings provides transportation, with a seat for every workman, at a rate of two cents per trip. Contrast that with the average condition here. The waste of opportunity in our granting of franchises has been great in many directions. In none is it more apparent than in the neglect of American cities to impose such conditions upon petitioning corporations as shall provide opportunilies for workmen’s dwellings in the suburbs. Railroads and trolley lines should be required by charter restrictions to run workingmen’s trains and cars at reduced prices at convenient times. Projected lines should insure that possibilities of housing be not neglected. This second requirement can be fairly imposed only by such an expert commission as that mentioned, which can examine proposed routes with relation to their housing possibilities.

Surveys of general conditions and recommendations of definite laws may do much; but to make such work lasting some body must be provided which shall deal with housing as a permanent city department. The construction of such a department, and the regulations under which it should act, should depend upon the information obtained by the preliminary body. A single department having in charge this one branch of civic life should be instituted in large cities where a bureau of this type does not exist. Such government as the slum has so far received has shown the disadvantages of a multiplicity of controllers, all too engrossed in their immediate affairs to pay much attention to this side-issue. The police, the fire department, and the department of health, have each had a share of authority; and between them all, little has been done. The Tenement-House Bureau of New York, ineffective as it has been under Tammany, is yet far better than the older methods which divided responsibility. But a housing department, if it is to have any value, must be backed by sufficient appropriations. The spirit of the people must be behind the movement. New York’s experience, as evidenced by the placard cited near the beginning of this article, has shown how useless legislation can prove when these things are wanting. The city must guard against nullifying such reform by legal intricacies or verbosities. The first necessity of the laws or ordinances under which such a department is to work is simplicity. The wording should be intelligible, not only to architect and builder, but also to any intelligent layman. Owner and tenant alike should be able to understand each and every paragraph. Nor is it certain that, in cities below the first class, this department should be a separate one. Place it under the control of an efficient board of health, and you are likely to get good results. Fortunately, moreover, if we grant the postulate of a rightly constituted department with sufficient appropriations, we shall find ample possibility of enforcement in the city’s hands.

If the housing authorities refuse to allow tenants to occupy a new house until all the necessary regulations have been met, builders become extremely anxious to meet requirements. The closing of a few houses which are unfit for human habitation, and the refusal of permits to occupy them until they have been properly renovated, bring about rapid repairs. Opposition to public control of private property is inevitable; yet the swiftness with which so great a movement for the city’s health has prevailed seems sometimes incredible. Every attempt which has been made to secure protection for tenants has been opposed by two classes of hostile building interests — the honest builder and the reckless speculator. The second of these groups should receive no consideration. The speculator who throws up a jerry-built house for the sole purpose of unloading it on some confiding investor at the first possible moment needs no protection. The community needs protection against him as against any other sharper.

To the honest landlord who objects to the apparently arbitrary control of his property there is but one reply. He must endure that control for the good of the community. No landlord can hold property without assuming liability for such assessments for betterment as the city may think it wise to make. His possession of property implies his assumption of liability to protective governmental measures. Fortunately the final tribunal of this country, the Supreme Court of the United States, has already determined the right of a state to say to its citizens, “You shall build in accordance with our laws and in no other way.” When the Massachusetts Legislature divided Boston into certain divisions and limited the height of the buildings in those sections, buildings in the residential quarter were required to be less in height than those in the business district. A citizen desiring to erect a building of a height above that allowed for a certain section of the city decided to test his rights and appealed his cause from court to court. He lost it. This affirmation of the right of a city to protect its citizens by its control of the building of their habitations makes this a decision of the greatest importance.

The great books whereon are blazoned the achievements of our American cities are still in the making. Turning the pages slowly, one finds many an illumined scroll, many a fair, full line. But side by side with those noble records stand blotted paragraphs where shame has ruthlessly despoiled the workman’s careful task. Here and there a sentence well begun has trailed off into vague traceries which carry no message to the eager searcher. Turn to the page on which the American city’s contribution to this great worldproblem of housing should be entered, and you will find it scarce begun. The filling of that page will be forced upon us, upon you and me, in the coming years.