Roadtown

by Edgar Chambless

The control of the local affairs in Roadtown will be wholly a matter of local option and the suffrage will be exercised by both sexes.

There will be no definitely set districts as townships or municipal wards, but each question to be voted upon will be submitted to the parties concerned, for illustration: the steward will be elected or recalled by the people whose food the preparation of which he superintends. They will also determine his salary. If they vote him a high salary and he hires an expensive set of helpers and sets a luxurious table the people who elected him can eject him if they do not approve of his extravagance, but if they desire to live wastefully they can do so and the people of more moderate tastes can move into a section which is known to be moderate. By such opportunity for local option, people will be given the chance of finding sections to suit their tastes and purses.

Roadtown will be a great equalizer of present life by the removal of special privileges of the rich and those who are “in” to reap where they have not sown, but there will be no tendency to dictate to the people how they should spend the money they have equitably earned. You now have to ask the gas trust, the ice trust, the milk and meat trust, the middlemen’s trust and many others even if it is permissible for you to marry and live a normal life.

The original price of Roadtown rents will be made to vary with the desirability of the location. Favored localities will be settled by people with the money to pay for it, and these people will naturally vote for high class service and this in turn will be added to the original price of rent. In this manner certain sections of Roadtown may become more expensive and so the various grades of society will find their wants readily supplied.

Roadtown will possess a leveling influence, it will hasten the equality and brotherhood of man and the Kingdom of God upon the Earth, but it will not reduce man to a single level at one operation, and if these natural laws of human nature should be outraged by an enforced leveling programme, the full Roadtown development would be seriously retarded for a generation.

Detached Villas Practical but Undesirable.

In my earlier work of planning on Roadtown I thought it would be necessary to cater to the wishes of the well-to-do by discontinuing the house line in some sections and breaking it up into detached villas. By carrying the monorails and all pipes and wires in a trench from villa to villa the full benefit of the co-operative functions could be attained, but of course with the additional expense of the extra land, extra length of the trench and its contents, the extra wall and the loss of the roof promenades. I know of nothing that will give a better conception of the wonders of Roadtown than to consider for a moment this villa construction. By the continuation of the Roadtown trench between villas it would be possible to give to a modest ten or twenty thousand dollar villa facilities that would cost half a million if installed in a single country or suburban home.

But when we had such a villa completed what advantage would we have over the continuous house? A few added windows on two sides of the house that would look out into the other fellow’s windows across the lawn and instead of passersby on a grand promenade above our heads entirely removed from our sight, or we from theirs, we would have a sidewalk by the door where our neighbors who became curious as to our domestic affairs could stroll and stare into our windows and doors. In practice more light and air could enter the two freely open sides of the Roadtown house than through the carefully shuttered windows on four sides of a “private” villa. I am satisfied that very few if any sections of Roadtown will be built in villas because they will offer no advantages that I am aware of to offset the disadvantages. People will accept the uniformity of the exterior of the roofs and walls as they now accept the uniformity of the street. Their personal tastes will be put on interior decorations or in beautiful gardens that may be seen from the roof promenade and enjoyed by all.

Before the bonds are offered for the development of any section of Roadtown the matter of municipal franchise, and options from suburban land owners and farmers for the right of way and for garden sites will progress as much as is practicable and a statement will be issued showing the appraisal value of this land, the status of the franchise matter, together with architects’ drawings and engineers’ plans, and specifications setting forth the estimated cost of a certain finished structure with equipments in a certain locality. This will give the prospective bond buyer an exact knowledge of the property upon which he may secure the mortgage in exchange for his money which will be held by trustees until the required amount is raised and then disbursed by them according to the specifications. That this will be an excellent security will be assured by the fact that the options will be secured at a very low rate because of the competition raised between rival land owners all of whom desire transportation and the other Roadtown facilities.

This principle has been made use of thousands of times in railroad and trolley promotion and has poured millions of dollars worth of watered stock into the hands of crafty promoters. As there is no promoter’s graft in Roadtown the bidding of land owners for this line of city through their neighborhood or property will turn to the benefit of the bond holder in enhancing the solidity of his security and to the land owner in bringing a strip of city to his farm.