“I can’t keep track of ’em. We had to take a boarder in to help us pay rent. Evenin’s there ain’t room here for us all to set down, much less have company. Young folks must have company.”
The persons responsible for these conditions, the tenement-owners, were ninety-nine out of every hundred well-to-do if not hugely rich. Their claim that it was the high cost of labor and materials that forced them to raise rents, in my district at least, was a lie.
During the last nine months of my service as inspector of dog licenses I made a point of asking in every tenement-house I entered, what repairs had been made during the past six months. According to my diary I found ninety-two houses where painting or repairs had been made at the expense of the landlord—ninety-two in the thousands, and tens of thousands, of tenement-houses in my district.
The vast majority of them not only made no repairs of any sort, but they cut down expenses. One nice little trick was to discharge a janitor to whom they had been paying a few dollars above the rent of her cellar or basement flat. After forcing her out or making her pay rent for her quarters, the agent would pick out a tenant, usually one with a small family, and notify the woman that she was to do the janitor’s work, scrubbing, sweeping, and keeping track of tenants, and her husband must do the repairs. For this they would be allowed five or six dollars a month on their rent.
It was either do it or get out of the house. As there were no flats to be had, the man and wife had to do as they were bid.
In one case of this sort the price offered was six dollars a month taken off the rent, and the husband, a plumber, was not only to do all repairs in the house, but was to furnish his own material.
CHAPTER XXII
WOLVES AS SOCIAL LEADERS
Because I found social service work unsuited to my talent does not mean that I think such work unnecessary, or that I in any way disapprove of it. Quite the contrary. While I deeply deplore the condition that makes such work necessary, the condition exists, and should be met so long as it does exist.
Social service workers are as necessary in the slums of New York City as doctors and nurses in a pest-house. As I saw conditions, the social service worker should always be a graduate nurse, a mature woman of wide experience. Often she has the duties and obligations of a physician thrust on her. Now, I make the above statement because of my experience.
Had I been a graduate nurse I would have been very much more valuable as a social service worker—though perhaps not so keen an observer of conditions. The efficient social service worker has to accept certain conditions as well-nigh unalterable. She is a human being—there is a limit to her strength, her power of endurance, her time, and also to the amount of money she has to spend.