The Cost of ShelterRichards, Ellen H. (Ellen Henrietta)
General
The Cost of Shelter
Richards, Ellen H. (Ellen Henrietta)
Building; Home economics
This sort of shelter is increasing more rapidly than any other in all the
cities investigated. An estimate has been made that 80 or 90 per cent of
the recent building has been of this sort. Six rooms in an unfashionable
locality rent for about $25 or $30 a month; in a fashionable quarter, for
$200 to $250 per month, with a floor-space one half larger. These latter
cost about 50 cents per week per room for daily care, whereas the former,
if cared for from outside, are served only at intervals of two weeks or a
month. The inmates do most of the daily care themselves. While the
building is new and fresh this means little work; but as time goes on the
poor construction shows, the surface varnish wears off, cracks come, and a
general shabbiness appears, so that the tenant prefers to move into a new
building. The owner, or more probably the agent, puts on a little shining
varnish, and rents again without real repair, and these buildings also go
from bad to worse. Many of them are known to change tenants two or three
times a year. There is always a demand for the newest house.
A study of social conditions reveals the fact that for the larger part of
the wage-earners the house has come to be the place where money is spent,
not earned or even saved. It has gone back to its primitive use--shelter
from weather and a sleeping-place, a temporary one at that. A real-estate
authority has made the assertion that three fifths of the rent-payers in
large cities are made up of non-householders and one half of these are
confined to one room--mostly women. This indicates a change in
requirements for the housing of the individual as distinguished from the
family. And it is this element which has complicated city living to a
great extent, and to which attention has been drawn by the accusation that
home life is shirked by it.
To the bachelor man and maid are added the commercial traveller who leaves
wife and possibly child behind four fifths of the time. For him, as for
several other classes of young business men, the locality which he can
choose for headquarters changes with the requirements of business. He is
under orders and must go at a moment's notice across the continent,
perhaps. It is not his fault but the exigency of business that destroys
the desire for a permanent abiding-place. The numbers of such homeless
young people are far greater than any one but the real-estate agent
realizes. Then this loosening of the home tie renders easy the shifting
from city to country and seashore. A considerable proportion of the $2000
to $5000 class shut up the flat or leave the boarding-house several times
in the year. There is usually one place where the furniture and
bric-a-brac and the other season's clothing are kept, but it is only a
storehouse or a temporary retreat that holds their property, growing less
and less as they move, until they may practically live in their trunks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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