REAL ESTATE
AND
NEW YORK, JANUARY 20, 1917
PROBLEM OF HOUSING INDUSTRIAL WORKERS
Duty of Employer of Labor to Concern Himself
About Conditions Under Which Workmen Live
By LAWRENCE VEILLER, Secretary National Housing Association
PART TWO.
very excellent
â– I ' HERE is a very excellent type
•*â– of dwelling that is suited to the
man of low earning capacity; and that
is, the single-fainily dwelling built in
rows or groups, what in some parts of
the country is known as a "terrace."
This type of house is the common type
of workin.gman's dwelling, in fact, one
may say the universal type, in Great
Britain. Where land values are high,
where building is costly, and especially
where it is necessary to keep down the
rent to $15 a month, this is the only type
of single-family dwelling in most parts
of the country—that can be built and
rented at this figure and at the same
time return a fair return upon the money
invested.
One of the great mistakes we have
made in attempting to house this type of
worker has been to neglect all considera¬
tions of how much land this worker can
afford to pay for. In most communities
where they have been dividing their
property into lots of 25 feet, 40 feet and
50 feet frontage, with depths varying
anywhere from 100 to 150 or 200 feet—3.
type of subdivision excellent for men of
means, and in some cases entirely ap¬
propriate even for the skilled mechanic,
but quite inappropriate for the man we
are now considering—they have gone on
and without thought have assumed that
the workingman earning $15 a week
should build a house upon property of
this type.
The workingman of low earning ca¬
pacity can no more afford to pay for
more land or more house than he can
afford to use than he can afford to pay
for more clothes or more food than he
can afford to use. The $15 a week man
-does not need a house 25 feet wide, nor
can he afford it.
I realize that there will be considerable
dissent from this statement and that to
many it will come as a new suggestion
and like all new ideas, will be keenly re¬
sented at first. But students of the prob¬
lem are quite agreed on this point, and
find that the best type of house for this
kind of workingman is a house of about
IS or 16 feet frontage, two stories high,
built in a row or group; containing not
more than five rooms and bath, and, pre¬
ferably, not more than four rooms; with
two living rooms on the ground floor
and a bath and two or three bedrooms,
as the case may be, on the second floor.
Such a house is best exemplified in the
ordinary commercially built Philadelphia
house, built literally by the hundred
thousand in that great city, serving as
the habitation of over a million people.
In speaking of the Philadelphia house,
there are two types which should be dis¬
tinguished. What is referred to here is
the four-room house, and not the more
recent type of development, a house with
six rooms, with an extension on the
ground floor.
It is an axiom in housing that no house
is "model" that exceeds two rooms in
depth. In fact, in Great Britain a house
deeper than this is practically unknown.
It could not be rented or sold.
How many rooms can the $15 a week
man afford to pay for? How many does
he want?
This raises a host of novel questions, I
appreciate. The writer has personally
had this question borne in upon him with
considerable emphasis recently through
the study of the trend of development in
the housing of certain portions of the
population of one of our large Eastern
cities, where the trend toward a smaller
number of rooms has been strikingly no¬
ticeable in recent years.
Causes for the Trend.
In seeking the causes for that trend
it has developed that the average work¬
ingman of this type cannot afford to oc¬
cupy more than four rooms and that usu¬
ally when he rents or pays for more than
four rooms he does not occupy them all,
but supplements his income by taking in
lodgers or boarders.
It was also discovered that he cannot
afford to heat more than four rooms;
that his wife, as a rule, especially in these
days, with the distractions of moving pic¬
tures and other attractive phases of city
life, does not wish to take care of more
than four rooms. Finally, the furnish¬
ing or equipment of more than four
rooms proves a burden. Of course, in
exceptional cases where there are very
large families, four rooms are not suffi¬
cient. These, however, are the excep¬
tional cases and not the rule.
If one can gauge accurately the pres¬
ent trend of social development, families
are likely in the future to continue to
grow smaller, and to need fewer rooms.
A house of the type we have described
can be built complete, with outer walls
of brick, with cellar, furnace, running
water and all modern improvements, even
in some cases including electric light fi.K-
tures, and sold, including the land and
improvements, such as curbing, paving
and grading, for $2,000, and can be rented
without difficulty for $15 a month, and
yield a commercial return. This is what
is done in the city of Philadelphia. It
is made feasible there by operating on
a wholesale scale and building many
houses at once.
Intensive Use of Land.
It is also made possible through the
more intensive use of the land which' the
smaller size lot lends itself to. It is thus
possible to get a great many more houses
on the same area of land than in the case
where a larger unit is employed; and, of
course, the cost of the smaller house is
also considerably less than that of the
larger house.
This is the type of house which has
been developed very successfully in a
number of so-called "model" dwelling
enterprises.
The Schmidlapp houses in Cincinnati,
at least the later ones and better ones,
are of this type. The houses recently
built by the Octavia Hill Association in
Philadelphia are of this type, as are also
those of the Improved Dwellings Asso¬
ciation in New Haven.
Most people when thev hear the su.g-
gestion that houses should be built in
rows or terraces seem to think that there
miistbe a stereotyped monotony to the
buildings.
This is, of course, quite unnecessary.
It depends merely upon the artistic taste,
ingenuity and skill of the architect. He
can vary his types of architecture just
as easily with the row house as he can
with the detached house.
A happy medium between the two and
a plan which lends itself very easily to
artistic treatment is the "group" house.
That is, the row house broken up into
groups of three or five, or seven or nine
or eleven, as may be desirable.
A treatment which gives variety and
ir pleasing to the eye is a skillful varia¬
tion of groups of this kind, having a
group of three houses intervene between
two groups of five or seven houses, etc.
Such a treatment has been worked out
for years in the case of the English gar¬
den suburbs and is very well exemplified
in Grosvenor Atterbury's treatment
of the Forest Hills development of the
Sage Foundation, built for a different
class of people, however.
Where land values are so high that it
is not possible to house the workers in
single family houses, even of the row or
terrace type, such as have just been de¬
scribed, it is still not necessary to re¬
sort to the tenement or "three-decker,"
for there is another type of house that
is infinitely better than either of these.
That is the two-family house. This is of
two types—the so-called "double house"
or semi-detached house, which is noth¬
ing more or less than two single-family
dwellings of the cottage type, with light
and air on three sides instead of four;
one side of each house being a party wall
common to the two.
This is well exemplified in the very
attractive houses constructed a year or
two ago in Salem by the Salem Rebuild-
mg Trust. It is a splendid type of house
for the workingman and even a good
type for the skilled mechanic, though as
a rule, it is better for him to have a com¬
pletely detached house.
The other type of two-family house,
sometimes called the "two-flatter," is
frankly a multiple dwelling, but of the
least objectionable kind, for it is only
two stories high and contains but two
families, one upstairs and one down,
with separate entrances, with separate
cellars, and oftentimes with separate
back yards.
Such a house has few of the objec¬
tionable features of the tenement, for
nothing is used in common except the
foundations and the roof. Houses of
this type are well exemplified by the
buildings of the Washington Sanitary
Improvement Company, developed by
the late General Sternberg. As a rule
they are built in rows and should con¬
tain practically the same number of
rooms as it would be deemed wise to
provide in the single-family dwelling of
the terrace type, namely, four rooms and
bath, or, at the most, five rooms and
bath.
Such houses, however, cannot have the
great advantage which the Philadelphia
house has, of being but two rooms deep.
In order to get the necessary number
of rooms for each flat it becomes neces¬
sary to build the building deeper, and
this means practically a series of courts
for the lighting of a certain number of
the rooiiis. No housing plan which con¬
tains this feature can be deemed either
model or desirable. It is at best a com¬
promise and should be frankly recog¬
nized as such.
All that has been said heretofore has
had reference to the housing of the man