MODEL HOUSING AS A COLLEGE COURSE
Some of the concrete results of the Tuskegee experiment in reconstructing the interior of the Negro rural home, were told in The Survey of August 30. Paine College, Augusta, Ga., a school for Negroes, supported for thirty years by southern white people, who feel that the Negro question can only be solved when the white descendants of slave owners set their hearts and heads to the task, is endeavoring to experiment on the reconstruction of the Negro city home by change of material environment If a $50,000 endowment can be raised the college will put into effect a plan of housing designed to prove it profitable, not only morally but financially, to provide the Negro an exterior environment which shall make the task of educating him for life easier. The scheme and the demand for better housing on which it is based is described by Mrs. John D. Hammond, wife of and co-worker with the white president of Paine College.
The whole plan is based upon the belief that the Negro is himself eagerly striving for a decent living. The Negroes’ own fight, individually, for better homes is said to be little short of heroic. All through the South, in city and country, Negro-owned homes witness to the increasing prosperity of a large class, and to the effort and self-denial of thousands more, whose income would seem to many of us, to put house-owning utterly out of the question.
But most Negroes belong to that economic class which, the world over, pays the heaviest rent in proportion to its income and yields the landlord the largest return on his investment, yet which receives in return little which is compatible with health or decency.
This is the tragedy of the Negro slum. Nobody is trying to abolish it, because nobody believes it can be done. We believe the Negro breeds the slum—instead of the slum breeding many of the Negro’s defects. Everywhere else people are re-creating the slum-dweller by abolishing the slum. We make no effort, partly because, as yet, few of us know of the widespread struggle for better housing the Negro is himself making.
What is needed, Mrs. Hammond believes, is an experiment station in Negro housing in the South. When it is proven, as it surely can be, that Negro day laborers and washerwomen can be decently housed at a fair profit to the landlord, southern money will be invested in houses of the right kind. But somebody must prove it, and advertise the proof far and wide.
The plan by which Paine College hopes to prove it is, in brief, to buy a city block of about six acres in Augusta, Ga., and build on four acres little three-roomed houses, such as day-laborers and washerwomen rent. The houses are to have a sink in every kitchen (water in the house is to this class a luxury unknown), and a toilet, ample window space, closets, and the porch so necessary to family comfort in a warm climate. By building double houses, and four acres full of them at a time, they can be put up for $850 per double house.[1] The rent would be two dollars the room per month, the current rent for that district. The lot for each family would be 20 x 105, which would afford a little garden-space in the rear—a privilege highly esteemed by many of the poorer Negroes, and one which, under the plan proposed, would be a powerful aid in the upbuilding of home and family life.
Four acres of the six-acre block would give room for forty double houses. The other two acres Mrs. Hammond designs to use as a playground for the children, and a site for a community house. This house should contain a kindergarten room and a room for boys’ clubs which could be thrown together at night and used for the recreation and the instruction of the grown people. It should have a room for cooking classes, one for sewing classes, a few free baths for men and women; and a small laundry and drying room, like those in the East End of London, a small weekly payment for the use of which would relieve the mothers from the heaviest of their drudgery, and set free much of their time for home-making. It would also make possible a war of extermination against the accumulations of trash about the ordinary Negro home, where so many abominations are claimed to be necessary for the sake of the pot and fire in the yard “to boil de clo’es.”
Rent would be collected on the Octavia Hill plan, with its concomitant thrift clubs, mothers’, men’s, children’s, and home-improvement clubs, and these clubs would do for the tenants just what it does elsewhere for slum-dwellers of other races. They would, Mrs. Hammond believes, be built up in character, the houses would be saved from the usual degeneration of property rented to this economic class, a good return would be realized on the investment, and the children ultimately turned over to the community as self-respecting and law-abiding instead of furnishing, as is inevitable under present conditions, their full quota of paupers and criminals, to be carried by the taxpayers of the city.
Three rooms would be reserved for the Negro worker, who would not only keep them as a model home, but would use them to train the girls in housework. This would leave seventy-nine three-roomed homes for rent, at six dollars each monthly, a yearly total of $5,688.00. This sum would pay the salary of the social worker, who is a necessity to the success of the plan, and yet yield 10 per cent gross on the investment, though two acres of the land and the settlement house, representing one-fifth of the sum invested would he unproductive from a commercial point of view. This is on the basis of an expense of $9,000 for land, $34,000 for forty double houses and $7,500 for the settlement house, a total investment of $50,500.
Rentals from Negro property now yield a larger gross return than this, as do rentals from similar property elsewhere; but the houses deteriorate so rapidly from misuse that the landlord feels that only an extraordinary profit while they last can insure him against actual loss. A gross return of 10 per cent where the buildings suffered only the depreciation caused by rational use would be as attractive to the ordinary business man here as elsewhere.
Mrs. Hammond’s scheme would be considered part of the educational system of Paine College. Good housing and good living as taught in the settlement and practically applied in the model housing plan would become a part of the school curriculum. The raising of the endowment fund is the present problem of Paine College. The peculiarity of this, as of all other Negro schools, is that the more students it has the poorer it is. Few of the pupils can pay the full amount asked of them, which is itself less than the actual cost of their board and tuition. Some work is furnished them—in kitchen, laundry and household for the girls, in grounds and garden for the boys—by which they partly pay their way. The plan is to have the income from the model housing endowment used to pay poor students for work done and so provide with an education many whom the college is forced now to turn away.
The homes, playground and settlement would furnish a practical field where young Negro women could be trained as social workers in order to meet the growing demand from white people in several southern states for trained Negroes to work among the poor of their own race.
[1] The houses would be of wood, as local conditions make the expense of brick or cement prohibitive.
BOYS’ “PETITION FOR INDEPENDENCE”
A “Petition for Independence,” signed by representatives of the boys and girls of Ithaca, expresses the principles of the Junior Municipality organized in that city the latter part of June by William R. George, director of the National Association of Junior Republics. The object of the “municipality” is the practical training of younger citizens in their rights and responsibilities by the formation of a government of junior officials who shall act in matters of the public welfare in co-operation with the city officials. Already the mayors of Cortland, N. Y., and Jersey City have asked Mr. George to start like organizations.
“We, the undersigned, being the youth of Ithaca, N. Y., between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, do respectfully call to the attention of our elders that, although not of age, we nevertheless feel we have reached the point where we could and should actively participate in the government of our city.
“We regard as merely a legal fiction the assumption that we are infants in all matters relating to the government of the community.
“We respectfully call attention to the fact that in time of war boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one are sent to the front to fight for their country and are frequently as officers placed in positions of peculiar responsibility and danger. Is it not self-evident that if youths can thus honorably acquit themselves in time of war, they could and should assume the less dangerous and onerous responsibilities of peace?
“We find in the annals of history that from time immemorial youths of our age have, when placed in positions of trust, acquitted themselves creditably. Before the age of twenty-one Alexander the Great was not only the ruler of Macedon, but the dominant power in all Greece; Charles James Fox became a member of the British Parliament before he was of age, and the younger Pitt became Prime Minister of Great Britain when he had scarcely passed his majority. In short, there is abundant evidence both in the past and the present that youth can and will rise to responsibility when it is placed upon them.
“Such being the case, we do hereby resolve to accept the suggestion of William R. George, the founder of the Junior Republics, and the invitations of Mayor Reamer and the Common Council and organize ourselves into a Junior Municipality in order that we may at once actively serve our city as junior citizens and thereby prepare ourselves for more efficient citizenship as adults.
“We hereby pledge ourselves to assist in the enforcement of all the laws and ordinances of the city, particularly those directly relating to boys and girls and their interests.
“We further pledge ourselves that when elected to any office in the Junior Municipality we will give our full and faithful co-operation to the adult official holding the corresponding office in the city government and will discharge our duties solely with reference to the welfare of the whole city.”