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REAL ESTATE
AND
NEW YORK, JANUARY 27, 1917
PROBLEM OF HOUSING INDUSTRIAL WORKERS
Duty of Employer of Labor to Concern Himself
About Conditions Under Which Workmen Live
PART THREE.
A subject about which there is much
difference of opinion is the question of
whether it is better to build houses to
sell to the workingman so that he may
own his home, or whether it is better
to merely rent the houses, thus keeping
control of conditions.
In the case of the average American
skilled mechanic earning $25 a week and
more there can be little question. That
type of worker is entirely capable of
owning his home and should, of course,
be encouraged in every way to become
a home owner. In fact, as a rule he
needs little' encouragement but is keenly
desirous of this.
With the great mass of unskilled
workers, however, the $15 a week_ man,
it is not at all so clear that it is de¬
sirable that he should own his home. I
know that many people will differ with
me, but I am clearly of the opinion that
it is not either for the best interest of
that type of worker or of the community
in which he lives that he should own his
home.
Home owning involves not only social
and moral responsibilities and qualities,
but very definite financial ones. The
man of low earning capacity has not suf¬
ficient financial reserves, nor can he ac¬
cumulate them, to make it desirable or
advantageous for him to become a prop¬
erty owner. He cannot, earning as he
does a low wage, accumulate a sufticient
reserve to enable him to acquire prop¬
erty without unduly sacrificing either his
family or himself. We have all seen
communities where workers of this type
have been encouraged to own their
home and do so by owning the mort¬
gage. I have in mind a Southern city
consisting largely of single-family dwell¬
ings where the workingman owns his
home upon the payment of $25 down
and then spends the rest of his life try¬
ing to pay off the interest on the mort¬
gage and secure a free and clear title.
This, as a rule, results in an improper
standard of living for him and his fam¬
ily. He frequently makes his wife and
children go without necessary food in
order to put aside money to pay off the
mortgage on the home; the recreational
facilities of the family are slighted, they
are improperly and inadequately clothed
and frequently improperly and inade¬
quately housed, for the house owner of
this type, as a rule, is unable to make
the expenditures that are necessary to
keep his house in proper condition.
After making a study of this question
through many years I am convinced that
we are doing the workingman of this
type an injury, not a service, in advo¬
cating the owning of his home, and that
we should frankly and clearly recognize
that for the $15 a week man, home own¬
ing is not a possibility.
From the point of view of the com¬
munity it is undesirable to have home
owners of this kind, for property thus
held rapidly deteriorates and causes the
neighborhood to assume a slumlike as¬
pect; it means also that the health au¬
thorities of that community find it in¬
creasingly difficult to secure from prop¬
erty owners of this type a compliance
with the proper standards of sanitation
By LAWRENCE VEILLER, Secretary National Housing
that are essential to the well being of
the community. The most difficult prob¬
lem that the health officers of this coun¬
try have to face is just this sort of prob¬
lem, namely, the attempt to get neces¬
sary improvements made in houses
where the householder is so poor that
he is unable to carry out the most essen¬
tial and fundamental requirements of
sanitation and health.
Henry Ford's Experience.
Henry Ford's experience in Detroit
on this question is quite illuminating.
When he started in, a year or so ago,
with his plan to pay all his workmen
$5 a day he expressed the belief that all
that was necessary to do for the work¬
ingman in America was to give him an
adequate wage and he would take care
of himself, and that it was poverty that
caused all of the troubles that we are
familiar with in our great cities; that
men lived in slums because their wages
â– vere inadequate; that the workingman
took lodgers or boarders into his home
because his .^earnings were inadequate,
and that when he received an adequate
wage such conditions would entirely
change.
Well, he tried it, and he was amazed
to find after a few months that his men
were living under exactly the same
squalid and sordid conditions that they
lived under before they received the $5
a day wage, and that most of them had
not changed their methods of living in
any degree, but were simply either put¬
ting away the additional money or
spending it on personal indulgences.
They were living in the same houses,
many of them, still bunking si.x men to
the room, sleeping in the clothes they
worked in, not bathing sufiiciently, and
either banking the extra money or
squandering or drinking it up.
Mr. Ford saw a great light. He rea¬
lized that his earlier views were mis¬
taken and at once put into operation a
plan for the investigation and super¬
vision of the conditions under which his
men lived. So that today he is making
his efforts count, and the men who con¬
tinue to live under the same squalid con¬
ditions that they lived under, with the
old wage, lose their jobs. He does not
want that kind of a man in his plant, and
he is right.
This illustrates perfectly the impor¬
tance of keeping control and of renting
rather than selling in the case of the un¬
skilled worker.
As I have already stated, the situation
is quite different in the case of the
skilled mechanic, the man who gets $25
a week and up.
Control Essential to Success.
The experience of the English garden
suburbs has been quite similar. They
started out, too, with the idea of having
the workingman own his home, but most
of them have come to the realization
through bitter experience, that they can¬
not maintain their garden suburbs as
such unless they do keep control, and
so the co-partnership plan has been
evolved. By this the company keeps
control, but the tenants are given an in¬
terest in the property and are enabled
to become owners of it through purchase
of shares of stock.
Association
It is not strange that this should be
the case if we stop to think of it. How
can we expect to maintain satisfactory
conditions if we leave the control of all
the intricate details of management to a
hundred or a thousand men of all sorts
and varying degrees of intelligence and
standards of living?
It is just as necessary to have cen¬
tralized control in an enterprise of this
kind as it is in a high grade apartment
house such as we find in our large cities.
Few of us would care to live in the best
apartment houses of New York city if
there were no resident janitor or super¬
intendent on the premises.
Few of us would care to travel on a
railroad train if the direction of the en¬
gine were left to all the passengers. We
need some one person who sKall be re¬
sponsible. As in railroading so in hous¬
ing enterprises, if we do not have a re¬
sponsible engineer or manager on the
job, the directors of the corporation may
cease to expect dividends and may ex¬
pect collisions.
Thus far we have considered the prob¬
lems involved chiefly with regard to the
individual house. What about the whole
community?
As a rule, an industrial housing enter¬
prise involves not merely the building of
a certain number of houses, but practic¬
ally the development of the entire com¬
munity. This is certainly the case where
the plant is located in the country away
from centers of population. Here it
becoines necessary to develop not only
the homes of the workingmen, but the
streets, the open spaces, the recreational
opportunities, the transportation facili¬
ties—in a word, the whole city plan.
It is in enterprises of this kind that
the Garden Suburb, which has been de¬
veloped to such an extraordinary ex-'
tent in England, becomes a practical
possibility for America. Here farsighted
employers of labor have a wonderful op¬
portunity. They can develop their com¬
munity in such a way that it will not
only furnish a healtliful and delightful
dwelling place for their workers, but
will be a real asset to the industry.
John Nolen has pointed out most
clearly that while we should not, as a
rule, build houses that will not pay a
commercial return, that is, a return of
at least 5 per cent, net, there are other
services which the employer of labor
can render his workers and should ren¬
der them without any danger of pauper¬
izing them or of economic disadvantage.
There are all sorts of things that go to
the making up of a model community
that the industry which dominates the
town can well afford to pay for and
which can much better be distributed in
the cost of the product made in that
town, than upon the shoulders of the in¬
dividual workers who make the product.
The street development, the park sys¬
tem, proper transit facilities, everything
that goes to inake up what we have in
mind when we talk of a "Garden Sub¬
urb" can be very advantageously paid
for and developed by the industry.
I am convinced that one reason why
we have not had the Garden Suburb or
Garden City movement developed to a
greater degree in this country has been
because the employers of labor have not