Bemocratic The Problem of Housing the Poor* I' By Percy Alden, M. P. T is only within the last fifty years that the community has deliberately set itself to the work of housing and rehousing its citizens. Any advance that has been made is due chiefly to the fact that the pressure of democracy in the city has compelled in the first place, the local authority, and finally the government, to take steps to counteract this cen tripetal force which has driven men from the country to the town. For many centuries the old boroughs and corporations of England have been the authorities charged with the control and the ownership of houses and buildings. It may be noted that even today some of the medieval towns in England still possess a considerable amount of property, a portion of their incomes coming from rents of such property. If we go back to the fourteenth century we shall find that the power to hold land and to own buildings upon that land was vested in the municipality. That power, under changed conditions, still remains, although for the most part under the Housing and Working Classes Act, 1890, it is exercised *Previous instalments of Mr. Alden's "Democratic England" series are: September, 1910, “Introduction;" October, "The State and the Child;" November, "The Problem of Sweating;" December, "The Problem of Unemployment;" January, 1911, "The Problem of Old Age." 311 chiefly in the direction of providing accommodation for the working classes. In the olden time our towns were walled in order to protect the citizens against an invading enemy-even London was at one time a walled town. As all fear of invasion passed away, the inhabitants tended more and more to build upon the land lying outside the walls, until at last such defences became obsolete. It was perhaps more fear than convenience which compelled men to gather in cities in those days, but today the city acts as a huge magnet, drawing to it the rural population and receiving year by year an immense increase in the number of its citizens. The industrial revolution, to which reference has already been made, is responsible for the marked exodus from country to town-a movement which as yet shows little sign of abatement. It is this question of congested population in the city, and a depopulated countryside, which has brought the whole housing question into prominence and compelled the attention of both municipalities and Parliament. The appointing of a Royal Commission on Housing in 1884, was the first big step in the direction of reform, an outcome, no doubt, of the strenuous feeling on social questions which was a characteristic mark of the whole country in the "eighties." The late King Edward, then Prince of Wales, was upon that commission, the report of which revealed the terrible overcrowding existing in the tenements and insanitary slums of the big towns. The fact is that the city grew so rapidly that the municipalities were taken by surprise, and those who were at the head of the city governments, without experience and often lacking ideas, found themselves quite unable to assimilate this inrush of new life, and especially unable to devise ways and means of properly accommodating the vast hordes of newcomers. No scientific or well-planned attempt was made in this direction; it was left entirely to private enterprise more or less unregulated. The result was that large numbers of the working classes, compelled to live near the factory owing to the exigencies of their labor, were crowded together in certain unhealthy districts. If new houses were built they were not inspected. The jerry-builder was allowed to do much as he liked, his plea being that the demand for houses must be satisfied. Accordingly, the housing reformer today finds himself face to face with a problem that is complicated by other social evils, in part created by bad housing, and certainly more or less irremovable while that difficulty remains untouched. Pauperism and crime, drunkenness, physical degeneration, disease, and high death rates are all bound up with the problem of housing. The Housing Commission, to which reference has already been made, had upon it not only our late King, but also men like Cardinal Manning, Lord Salisbury, Sir Charles Dilke, who acted as chairman, and many other men of influence. Its report has served as a basis for some of the reforms which have since been instituted, although at the same time it must be confessed that the movement in favor of Town Planning, Garden Cities and Garden Suburbs, is more modern. Finally, the Housing and Town Planning Act, 1909, while it is not by any means a perfect piece of legislation, has brought home to the public the extent of existing housing evils, and has secured for municipalities fuller powers for dealing with those evils, and some facilities in respect both of obtaining land and money. The latter part of the Act, that which deals with Town Planning, is so valuable that we shall refer to it at some length. It must not, however, be thought that the housing problem is unknown in rural districts. It is no exaggeration to say that there are hundreds of villages in England in which it is impossible to house another family without over-crowding, in which no cottages are available for young married people, and from which therefore, as a direct result, there is a constant drift to the town. Many of the cottages that still remain possess considerable antiquity and externally are picturesque, but the thatches are in a ruinous condition, the walls are damp and mildewed, the floor is often nothing more than earth and clay, the water supply is wholly lacking as are all sanitary conveniences. The landlord refuses to make habitable such cottages and pulls them down when the old people die. He pleads as his excuse for not building fresh cottages, that the cost is too great, and that the laborer is not able to pay an adequate rent. Both in the town and in the country we have aspects of the same problem. So far as the great city is concerned the tendency is today, by means of decentralization by rapid electric transit, by cheaper and more convenient houses in the suburbs, to draw the working classes from the center of the town to the broad belt of land which is its circumference. Hence the movement in favor of City Making, Garden Suburbs and Garden Cities. Just one or two figures may be given to show how great is the crowding in the industrial centers: The Census Commissioners of 1901 described as overcrowded 392,000 tenements in which were living 2,667,000 persons; that is to say, 8.2 per cent. of the whole population of England and Wales were officially reported as overcrowded in the last census. This is a considerable improvement upon the previous census of 1891, and it is hoped that by the time the next census is taken, owing to the vast change that cheap rapid transit has made, we may be able to show that this percentage of overcrowding has been halved, and that with this decrease in the number of overcrowded tenements has come a corresponding diminution in death rates and disease. It is, however, still a sufficiently serious matter that more than half a million people live in dwellings of only one room. Today in London, with all its immense wealth, nearly two-thirds of the whole population live in dwellings of not more than four rooms in all, while in Glasgow, famous for its splendid municipal enterprise, no less than one-fifth of the people live in oneroom dwellings, and more than half the people have houses of not more than two rooms. Edinburgh, "The Modern |