East Rittenhouse Street, Rear, After Improvement.
New Houses, East Rittenhouse Street Property, Germantown.
Housing Seven Families. Rental, $6.50 for 2–Room Flat, $9.00 for 3–Room Flat, $11.50 for a 4–Room House. Separate Entrance, Toilet, Cellar, Water Supply for Each Family.
It has not been a triumphant progress from strength to strength with these Germantown houses and their untrained and ignorant Neapolitan and Sicilian occupants. Many of the men are unskilled laborers for the city, content to earn a little and spend the money in long seasons of idleness. Two volunteer rent-collectors, speaking Italian, have been of great assistance, and the summer playground, a visiting nurse, and garden allotments have strengthened the hold of the Association upon the tenants.
The transformation wrought by the summer of 1917 was truly wonderful. In place of the abomination of desolation described in the front yards of 1911, corn waved, and beanvines flourished. Besides the gardens thriftily cultivated by each householder where lettuce, celery and tomatoes grew in abundance, there was a large community garden with a square plot for each tenant, kept carefully weeded. From the windows giving upon the street the flag of Italy flew, and on the steps the mothers of little Italy sewed and gossiped and watched their bambini at play. In the pavilion of the ample central yard were happy families enjoying the shade, the children playing games, the babies napping in their tiny hammocks swung from the eaves. The whole offered as charming a picture of contentment in a congenial environment as one would care to see.
A group of new houses in the district known as Richmond, an entire block of model dwellings for workingmen, represent a distinct departure from the policy to which the Association adhered for many years. But the enterprise, to which the Board gave most of its time and thought in 1914, recommended itself to the deliberate judgment of the members for two leading reasons—first, that it was becoming constantly harder to find old downtown houses for renovation which could be bought and altered at a cost permissive of a dividend, and, second, that the demand is waxing day by day for carefully designed and suitably equipped low-priced dwellings, since the operative builder is unaffected by philanthropy, and is building to sell or else to rent his houses for at least $15 a month.
The Property Committee of the Board obtained an option on a tract in Richmond and was about to close the bargain when the rude hand of war, that has paralyzed so many efforts for the world’s good, descended on the market and made it prudent to defer action until the spring of 1915. Then the more cheerful financial prospect seemed to justify a resumption of the task. A lot adjoining the one originally chosen, measuring 212 by 165 feet and fronting on Cambria Street, was obtained. The total cost of the land and the dwellings that were put on it was $63,000.
“The Philadelphia Model Homes Company” was created by the Board as a separate corporation to finance the undertaking, to own and operate the dwellings, and to continue its work in the future for any similar group it might be deemed wise to create if the first venture justified itself.
The new corporation started with a nominal capital of $2,000. This sum was presently raised to $20,000; and the capital stock was entirely taken by the Octavia Hill Association, which named the directors and entered into absolute control. The rest of the cost of the operation—$43,500, or about two-thirds of the whole—was obtained by the sale of first mortgages, each secured on a particular lot and dwelling, and yielding 4.4 per cent. interest. The Finance Committee devised the scheme because, in the first place, it would limit the financial liability of the Association to the $20,000 of its actual investment, and in the second place the first mortgages at fixed interest on specific properties would more readily secure takers than dividends on the stock of the corporation.