The Cost of Shelter

by Ellen H. Richards

Rent, heat, light, etc.	$ 400
Food	800
Clothing hardly less than	400
Children's education, even with free schools, and their illnesses will use up	100
Car-fares, church, etc.	100
Wages and sundries	200
	_____
Total	$2000

In the bank nothing.

But what shelter can this refined, intelligent family find to-day for $400? Certainly nothing with modern conveniences. The lack of these is made up by women's work—hard, rough work. And that is the crux of the servant problem to-day. It is the reason why more families do not go into the country to live. The work required in an old house to bring living up to modern standards is too appalling to be undertaken lightly.

In England the Sunlight Park and other plans, in America the Dayton and Cincinnati schemes, are samples of what is being done for the $500 to $800 family, but where are the examples (outside the Morris houses) for the salaried class for whom we are pleading? The great army of would-be home-makers are forced into a nomadic life by the exigencies resulting from the great combines—a shifting of offices, a closing of factories, a breaking up of hundreds of homes. I believe this to be the chief factor in the decline of the American home—a hundred-fold more potent than the college education of women.

The unthinking comment on this rise in the cost of shelter is usually condemnation of greedy landlords and soulless capitalists; but is that the whole story?

In the present order of things it seems to be inevitable that the gain of one class in the community is loss to another. Probably the law has always existed, and only the very rapid and sudden changes bring it into prominence, because of the swift readjustment needed, an operation which torpid human nature resents when consciously pressed.

For instance, the efforts of the philanthropist and working man together have succeeded in shortening hours of labor and increasing wages—without, alas! increasing the speed or quality of the work done, especially in the trades which have to do with materials of construction, so that house-building has about doubled in cost within twenty-five years, largely due to cost of labor. This increased cost has fallen heavily on the very group of people least able to bear it, the skilled artisan, the teacher, and the young salaried man. Again I call attention to the need of a philanthropist who shall raise his eyes to that group, the hope of our democracy, those whom he has held to be able to help themselves—and given time would do so; but time is the very thing denied them in this motor age. Help to make quick adjustment must come to the rescue of those to whom time more than equals money.

One used to wait patiently for seed-sown lawns to become velvety turf. Money can bring sod from afar and in a season give the results of years. So the housing of the $2000 family can be accomplished just as soon as it seems sufficiently desirable. It needs a research just as truly as the cancer problem or desert botany, and affects thousands more.

One other cause of increased cost in construction and operation which does, if wisely carried out, increase health and efficiency is the sanitary provision of our recent building laws.

The instalment of these sanitary appliances becomes increasingly costly because of the rise in wages of the workmen, plumbers, masons, etc. The careful statistics of the Bureau of Labor show conclusively that all building trades have decreased hours of labor and increased wages per hour, so that cost of construction has doubled, and the sanitary requirements have again doubled the cost, so that it is easy to see why the family with a stationary income has quartered its dwelling-space.