================================================================ | | NUMBER | DISTRICT | TOTAL | OF | PER |FAMILIES| OWNERS | CENT --------------------------------------|--------|--------|------- Bohemians--10th Ward | 295 | 36 | 12 Polish--16th Ward | 2,785 | 355 | 13 Italian--"Lower North" Side | 1,462 | 119 | 8 Italian--19th Ward | 1,936 | 208 | 9 Polish and other Slav--South Chicago | 545 | 100 | 18 Lithuanian--4th Ward | 1,009 | 241 | 24 Slovak--20th Ward | 869 | 148 | 17 Polish, Lithuanian, other Slavic--29th| | | Ward, Stockyards District | 1,616 | 298 | 18 ================================================================ The housing studies in Chicago furnish many illustrations of this sacrifice.[27] For example, among the Lithuanians in the Fourth Ward, there was a landlord who lived in three cellar rooms so low that a person more than five feet eight inches tall could not stand upright in them. The kitchen, a fair-sized room with windows on the street--though its gray-painted wooden walls and ceiling served well to accentuate the absence of sunlight, was merely gloomy, but the other two rooms were both small and dark, with tiny lot-line windows only four square feet in area. In one of these rooms, 564 cubic feet in contents, the father and one child slept; the other, which contained only 443 cubic feet, was the bedroom of the mother and two children. One of the highly colored holy pictures common among the Lithuanians and Poles, though it hung right by the window, was an indistinguishable blur. The agency through which the purchase is made may be either the real-estate dealer of the same national group, or, more commonly, the building and loan association. The real-estate agents to whom the foreign-speaking immigrants go are like the steamship agents, the immigrant bankers, the keepers of special shops. Those who are honest and intelligent render invaluable services; those who wish to exploit have the same opportunity of doing so that is taken advantage of by the shyster lawyer, the quack doctor, the sharp dealer of any kind who speaks the language and preys upon his fellow countrymen. Reference has been made in an earlier chapter to the services rendered by the building and loan associations in enabling the foreign born to obtain homes. They also render services in providing the means for safe investment for those with only small sums to invest. BUILDING AND LOAN ASSOCIATIONS