generally considered that for the average family over-crowding begins when the number of rooms per person falls below one. Courtesy of the Boston City Planning Board THE FIRE HAZARD IS SERIOUS IN THIS NARROW ALLEY Note the frame structures and inflammable litter. Yet in many communities whole families are living in one room, and even taking in boarders to eke out the rent. The evils that result from overcrowding are only too apparent. Judges in the Children's Courts affirm that such congestion is directly responsible for most of the cases of juvenile delinquency. Children are in the way at home. There is literally no room for them; so they are turned out into the streets. Here without any kind of su pervision they mingle with the roughest sort of characters. The army of pickpockets is maintained by children from these districts, often taught by the "boarders" at home. Such herding of men, women, and children living, eating and sleeping in the same room places temptation constantly in the way of the growing boy or girl. So instead of good citizens, bad citizens are produced who become an expense rather than an asset to the community. Over-crowding also increases the danger of loss of life in fires. The interior of the old-style tenement building is of wood. The stairways are wooden, steep and dark, and the fire-escapes are adequate in neither size nor strength for the number of tenants in the house. There is a notoriously high death rate in connection with tenement house fires. When a fire starts in the cellar, as it usually does, and sweeps up the stairway, which acts as a chimney and spreads the flames out fan-like at each landing, the families on the upper floors have small chance of escape. Such conflagrations are the dread of fire depart ments. Another result of over-crowding is a high death-rate from tuberculosis. Living in small, crowded, and ill-ventilated rooms serves to lower the vitality of the individual and weaken his resistance to disease. Then, when one member of the group has been attacked, crowded sleeping conditions help the spread of the disease to the others, until all are infected. These people cannot afford to pay for proper care and treatment. The cases, therefore, become a public charge, and the community must bear the expense. 4. THE OLD TYPE OF TENEMENT HOUSE In 1915 the United States Public Health Service made an investigation of housing in Cincinnati, where they found a larger percentage of the population living in tenement houses than was the case in any other city. They found, too, that the factories had more light and air, and a better supply of water than the workmen's homes, and that they were far more sanitary in every way. The report describes these Cincinnati houses as old dwelling houses which had been converted into tenements, three or four stories high, having "a common entrance at the side where a narrow hall divides the house into front and rear apartments. The halls and stairways are almost universally dark. On each landing there is a sink with tap water to be used in common by the two families on the same floor. The kitchen . . . situated in the middle of the house, is usually the darkest room in the apartment. There are no bathrooms. Almost universally the toilets are situated in the narrow yard and each one is shared by two or more families.” * Cincinnati now has a "Better Housing League" organized by a number of public-spirited citizens. The League is endeavoring to improve the houses of the workers in the poorer districts of the city. The League has found that the greater proportion of deaths from tuberculosis occur in the congested, badly housed districts. "The time is rapidly approaching when the housing of its people will be regarded as the measure of a city's progressiveness and of its Civic Spirit." † A visitor to the lower east side of New York City to-day would find similar conditions, except that the tenement houses are much larger and higher. There are blocks of old-fashioned flathouses in the Cherry Hill section in which almost unbelievable conditions exist. Most of the apartments consist of two or three rooms, of which one opens on a narrow, dark, evil-smelling court, while the others are dark, have no windows, and are ventilated only through a door which opens into the room facing the court. Such rooms as these, without direct openings on a court or a street, are called "blind" rooms, and in them often as many as five people sleep. Many of the cellars and yards of these houses are littered with refuse. There is seldom a sufficient supply of garbage cans for the use of all the families crowded into the house. It would be illegal to build such tenements to-day in New York City, but these were built before the better housing laws were passed, and there is no law which requires them to be torn down. 5. How SUCH CONDITIONS WERE ALLOWED TO START Since it is so obvious that this sort of housing is dangerous to community well-being, why is it that towns have allowed such conditions to start, much less to grow until they have become a public menace? *"Public Health Bulletin, No. 73, page 81. "Houses or Homes." First report of the Cincinnati Better Housing League, June, 1919. In the beginning of the nineteenth century the whole process of manufacturing, in the United States, shifted from the home to a building outside of the home. In order to be near their work, the workmen and their families herded together in houses in the neighborhood of the factories. It was not until comparatively recent times that rapid transit lines were developed so that a workman I could live at a distance from his work, and be carried back and forth without too great expense in time and money. The second cause is a more intangible one. The political thinkers of the time, when this shift of the process of manufacturing from the home to the factory building was taking place, did not believe that the gov WEBSTER AVENUE, BOSTON, MASS., TEN TO The City Planning Board wishes to widen this space. ernment should interfere to any great extent with the individual. It was a period of revolt against government control, brought about by hundreds of years of government oppression. Herbert Spencer, a famous English sociologist, even went so far as to oppose a publicly owned school system. Government control and regulation such as we now experience in the activi |