Modern Housing
by [Houghton Mifflin, $5.001
As an avowed part of the programme of the New Deal, housing has recently become front-page news. A book, therefore, which surveys the history of modern housing from its real beginning in the nineteenth century to the present year, knowingly and searchingly, and which is written by one who has had an exceptional opportunity to study the subject in those European countries where the only real progress in housing has been made, is an important event. The author has been associated with those active proponents of housing in this country, Clarence Stein and Lewis Mumford, and so is additionally equipped to appraise efforts here.
Housing is not to be confused with building houses. Nor should Mr. Ralph Adams Cram’s oft-quoted remark that architecture has shown greater progress in recent years in the United States than elsewhere persuade us to adopt a complacent attitude toward our achievements in housing. Housing, as Miss Bauer defines it, — the providing of ‘certain minimum amenities for every dwelling . . . at a price which citizens of average income or less can afford,’ — is practically nonexistent in this country. Stretching a point, we might find, she says, five or ten thousand examples which demonstrate some effort toward non-speculative, largescale housing. Radburn in New Jersey and Chatham Village in Pittsburgh are the best examples of a modern planned community here, but they are not for the lower income groups. In Europe there have been erected since the war at least six million such dwellings.
The reasons why there is modern housing in Europe and none in America are understood when we survey with this author the preparatory steps that have been taken there. Reform movements that are only beginning here got under way in England and on the Continent in the nineteenth century. They resulted in model towns which, although company owned. — usually not a beneficial condition, — nevertheless included some excellent examples of good planning. Thus certain important standards were early fixed. The next advance was due directly to the efforts of those movements which were ‘ conscious crystallizations of socialist theory that is, the coöperative movements, trade-unionism, workers’ parties, and revolutionary sects. By 1907, separate cooperative societies in England had put up 25,000 houses. Her famous Garden Cities are an outgrowth of this movement. In England laws were passed as far back as 1851-1890 which gave local governments power to take their own lands for housing and to borrow for this from the public funds; also, to condemn or repair at the expense of the owner any house found unsanitary. When after the war England, like other countries, was faced with a housing shortage, the only legislation needed was that permitting the subsidy.
The coöperative movement spread rapidly to other parts of Europe. In Germany, where some of the best modern housing has been done, there were at least 1400 coöperative housing societies by 1914. Housing in Germany was also aided by the fact that a land-purchasing policy which went back to the Middle Ages enabled cities to hold land and exercise strict control over unbuilt areas. But in Germany as elsewhere the real ‘touchstone of post-war housing was the organized and well-informed demand.’ When this demand became sufficiently vocal to stir governments to action, the ground had been prepared for the use of public funds to satisfy it. The result was houses that are not only better but, as Miss Bauer points out, different. They start from the premise of sunlight and air and have regard to the common daily operations of the housewife. They approach, if they do not entirely reach, the ideal of the neighborhood as the unit in planning; removal from the speculative field; availability for the lower income groups. To quote Miss Bauer again, ‘The combined efforts of speculative builders, building and loan associations, and individuals building for themselves, cannot supply a new dwelling at a price which even half the population can pay. . . . Modern housing, if it is to be done at all cannot be patchwork. It is not reform within the old pattern. It is either an entirely new method of providing an entirely new standard of urban environment, or it is nothing.’
ETHEL, B. POWER