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Real estate record and builders' guide: [v. 99, no. 2550: Articles]: January 27, 1917

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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 ■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