Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree

“ It is disastrous to the nation as a whole, that many of its workers should be unable to pay for proper accommodation, nor can it ultimately benefit the employer. We must not only cheapen housing and decasualise labour, but we must raise wages, and then we can definitely compel the municipalities to carry out the law which says "Every house in this locality shall be reasonably fit for habitation." ”

“ To-day, if a municipality builds, it can get the whole amount at the lowest price—31⁄2 per cent. A Public Utility Society, such as a Tenant Co-partnership Society, can get two-thirds of the value. An individual who wants to buy or build a house for himself can get four-fifths under the Small Dwellings Acquisition Act; but hardly anyone takes advantage of that Act, and probably most people are ignorant of it. A private speculative builder can get half, but if he has little capital of his own he needs more than half, and he can get more on mortgage. ”

“ Of course, too, this crowding together of people per acre and per room, has the most prejudicial effect upon the health of the community. Disease not only spreads with extraordinary rapidity, but is generated under such conditions—a fact especially noticeable in the case of tuberculosis. A house that is lacking in light and ventilation, as houses are bound to be in these narrow streets, provides just the conditions which are most favourable to the development of this terrible malady; and yet many millions of the working people are living in such houses. ”

“ Undoubtedly, however, a large number of bona fide working men, regular workers, or casual workers, would still be unable to afford a sanitary and satisfactory house. It is impossible really to solve the housing problem till this condition of things has been altered, and a wide extension of the policy of the Trade Boards Act, placing an increasing number of trades under it, and fixing a minimum wage for them, is essential to true housing reform. ”

“ I got working people to tell me exactly what they paid for produce bought in the market—often last thing on Saturday night when prices were at their lowest—a fruiterer in a small shop gave me week by week his prices for three years for similar produce, and I took whichever was the lower—the fruiterer's, or the market price, and I valued the produce of the 24 plots, and I found that in those little gardens, cultivated by men working some in a factory, others on the railway, they were getting on the average a net £31 worth off every acre—£53 gross and £31 net. ”

“ In the lowest division are houses which, though they may be found in isolation, or in small groups, are generally congested in slums—houses deficient in some or all of the following essential conditions: light, space, ventilation, warmth, dryness, and water supply. A house should fulfil the minimum standard of hygienic requirements in all these respects, but these houses fall very far short of it. Although we have no accurate statistics, such information as we have points to the fact that probably as many as two or three million people live in houses belonging to this class. ”

“ With forty houses to the acre, every £100 per acre costs one halfpenny per week, but with only twelve houses per acre, it costs three halfpence per week. That means sevenpence halfpenny per week if £500 per acre is paid, and if the cost of the roads and the sewers is £300—a fair average—that is another fourpence halfpenny. Now a shilling a week for the developed land is really an important consideration. And we must remember what we often forget, that when land is dear, the workman does not necessarily pay more—perhaps he cannot, but he gets less for what he pays. ”

“ But now we are confronted with the fact that there is a great shortage even of such houses as I have described. Recent investigations in a great number of towns, show pretty clearly that in about half the towns of England there are many working men who cannot get accommodation suited to their needs. Either they must go into houses that are much too large, and take lodgers to help to pay the rent, or they must crowd into houses that are unsatisfactory or much too small, not because they are unable or unwilling to pay for better ones, but because there are none to be had. ”

“ If we are to develop on Garden City lines we ought to have land at not more than £300 an acre; and we must ask whether it is available for building workmen's houses at a figure within that limit. Now, the price of land is largely determined by the relation between the available supply and the effective demand. Therefore, the way to cheapen land, since obviously we do not want to lessen the demand, is to increase the available supply. ”

“ There is no reason why we should not limit the number of houses which may be built to the acre. Just as bye-laws enact that the rooms in a house shall not be less than a certain height, or a certain superficial area, they should limit the number of houses to the acre, since overcrowding per acre may be just as serious as overcrowding per room. ”

“ People have not been tempted to invest in house property, which is always an anxiety, when they had such good alternatives in absolutely liquid securities. Next, there has been a very rapid rise in the cost of constructing a house—a rise of 10 or 12 per cent, during the last 10 years. Added to these causes which have discouraged the building of new houses, the increased activity of Sanitary Authorities, under the 1909 Housing and Town planning Act, has resulted in the closing of a large number of houses. ”

“ Again, many a bricklayer whose work is in Brussels never goes near the town in the winter time. He too, works at his garden, and leaves what bit of bricklaying there is in Brussels to his mate who lives there. Like the docker, he has two trades—an enormous advantage when work is scarce. ”

“ Again, dwelling outside the town, if it were made possible by cheap and rapid transit, would widen the range of possible occupation. A man might till the garden of another man who is working overtime and cannot attend to it himself, but is willing to pay a substitute. Or he may work for a neighbouring farmer. It would make the position of both the regular man and the casual very much better than it is at the present time.
Moreover, it is remarkable what a man can get out of a little plot of land. For three years I very exhaustively examined the returns of 24 plots of land. ”

“ Nor does he, because land is a commodity which is not perishable. If he were selling fruit and the demand were slack, he would be bound immediately to reduce his price, as otherwise his goods would perish on his hands. Or if he were selling diamonds, to take another extreme case, and had fixed his price too high, he might completely kill his market. No one is under any compulsion to buy diamonds, and too high a price may discourage buyers altogether. ”

“ In any long railway journey we pass through town after town, and see these dismal rows without a vestige of greenery about them, only characterised by their meanness and by their deadly monotony. When such homes are overcrowded, and only have two bedrooms, it is impossible, or next to impossible, to live decently, especially when the family is grown up. ”

“ In Belgium, one-third of the town-workers live in the country, and they come into the town by cheap workmen's trains. In Liège, which has a population of 160,000, there are 10,000 people coming in from the country to work. If we could get an improved system of transit, we could make available a large amount of cheap land, and it would then be quite easy to spread houses more widely over the ground. It is sometimes argued that the workmen would not take advantage of such facilities if they were provided—that he wants to live near his work. ”

“ But there is another way, and that is by improving transit facilities. All round our towns there is any amount of land, at perhaps £50 an acre. A very little way out of even London, land may be bought at that price. But it seems clear that we shall never make such land available for the housing of the working people, until we have a much more complete system of transit. It must be very cheap and very rapid transit, and it must be especially adapted to the working hours of the district. ”

“ In towns where rents are high the proportion is higher. A short time ago I investigated a number of houses in London, and there it rose to 20 to 25 per cent. But taking the country as a whole, probably the majority of the working classes are paying at least one-sixth of their total income in rent, although the quality of the dwellings is often so unsatisfactory. ”

“ There is no doubt that any alteration in our rating system by which land was assessed for rating on its capital value instead of on the basis of the rent it was producing, would bring into the market a good deal of land which at present is not available. ”

“ That seems to be nothing; but the reason is that, on account of the cost of land, we squeeze 30, 40, and 50 houses to the acre, and so the site purchased is excessively small. Those long dismal streets are, in the first instance, the result of the cost of land. In the country, where it is cheap, we see houses with bits of garden. But the nearer we draw to the town, the smaller the garden grows, till at last it resigns altogether in favour of the backyard. ”

“ As land becomes dearer the backyard in turn grows smaller and smaller, until it is reduced to the very least compass that the bye-laws will permit. When it becomes dearer still it is necessary to erect tenement dwellings—and there are landings in tenement dwellings in London, up four or five storeys, which the women have not left for four years. They live like canaries in a cage. ”

“ Of course if the Public Works Loan Commissioners lent a larger proportion of building capital than they do now, they would be justified in charging interest at a somewhat higher rate, the difference between the new and the present rate going to a national reserve fund, out of which possible losses might be paid. ”

“ Instead of walking up and down the streets—and there is nothing on God's earth that drags a man down faster than unemployment—instead of going pathetically from factory to factory asking for a job, he tills his bit of land. ”

“ We often hear it said that the price of land enters to such a very slight extent into the total cost of a house, that it need not trouble us. Except in the centre of great cities, the price of a site, taking a fair average, is only about £35, or say 30s. ”

“ Without labouring this point, I urge, then, that land must be cheapened, by rating, by improved methods of acquisition, by cheap transit, or by all three methods together.
As to improved development, there is no doubt that roads can be made somewhat more cheaply. This does not mean that we should have inferior roads, but with fewer houses to the acre, they need not be so heavy, the actual paved road can be narrower, and the spaces between the houses can be mainly utilised for gardens. A cheaper development per house is possible with 12 houses to the acre than with 40. ”

“ He may have to live for a time on potatoes, and a bit of bacon and greenstuff, but he does not starve, and he is ten times better off than his mate in the town. I was amazed, in Belgium, to see how the hardships of unemployment were mitigated by the possession of this garden, which acted as a buffer between the family and destitution. ”

“ They go out at the first chance, and their friends come and see them, and are fired by their example. It means a garden, where vegetables can be grown, and the children can play, and it means a far more healthy, a better, and a bigger house, at the same rent that they paid in the town. The children grow up and marry, and want to live under similar conditions. ”

“ Probably there are at least half a million casual workers in this country. They never know from week to week, sometimes from day to day, whether they will have anything to do; and as a man grows older, his chances of getting work from the casual labour market decrease. Now, if he is simply seeking work for wages, it is all or nothing; he is employed or he is not. He may be 95 per cent. as good as the man that gets a particular job, but that 95 per cent. is absolutely wasted when he gets no work at all. But if he has a little land, he can use his 95 per cent. ”

“ We do not realise that one person in ten is living under what are technically known as "overcrowded conditions"—that is, with more than two persons to every room in the house. And these houses are crowded thirty, forty, and even fifty to the acre. ”

“ If money can be borrowed from the Public Works Loan Commissioners for the building of houses at 1 per cent. less than from private sources, that 1 per cent., on a house costing £260, is equal to a saving of a shilling a week in the rent. ”

“ But the man who goes to work at ordinary times is quite willing to travel for half an hour if he can do so in decent comfort, and can secure a really better home by the daily journey.
There is a little village outside York, 21⁄2 miles from the middle of the city, with no means of transit except walking or bicycling along a muddy road, yet the houses could be let over and over again. The history of Garden Suburbs, all over the country, shows that a great many people are anxious to live in them. ”