Good housing that pays /

by Fullerton L. Waldo

The real reward of the work to the right sort of worker is in this lively, daily chance to meet the people and to help them in their problems by the service that is better than the outright gift of money.

Here, for a trivial instance, we come to a humble door where the rent is due, and a poor man has great boxes of laces which he means to move upstairs and store where he lives. There is really no space for the stuff in the one room that he shares with wife and baby. He plans to sell his wares from his cart beside the curbstone on the morrow. The boxes are nearly as big as an upright piano. He cannot afford another place for storage. That is his problem. To you and to me, living in a whole house, the advent of such boxes would be nothing to worry about. But if this vendor can’t secure from the friendly rent-collector a suspension of the unwritten rule against overcrowding his small space, he is in a grievous predicament.

Once the Homes of Philadelphia’s Merchants and Business Men. Changing Neighborhood Conditions Made it Necessary to Alter These Houses for Tenements. Each House Has 5 Apartments, 2 to 3 Rooms Each. Rent, $5.50 to $13.00 Per Month.

A few minutes later we find a whole court in an uproar over an incident that would mean little to those of us who have gardens of size and gardeners of skill. One of the fathers living in the court—a one-armed man—has spent a blistering Sunday afternoon inducing morning-glories to cling to the strings he has put up against the high board fence. The little plot of ground on which his plants grew was perhaps thirty feet long, and a foot and a half wide. He took pride in the result, and his neighbors praised it. When his back was turned a little Polish child of two, living next door, came trotting along, pulled down the wire netting he had arranged in front, and tore off the vines that he had laboriously twisted round the strings.

The indignant neighbors insist, in conclave, that the mother stood in the doorway laughing while the child wrought this mischief. To the friendly rent-collector the mother, with small English but with a profusion of gesture, explains her injured innocence. After long and excited parley, in which everyone who is at home in the court takes part, peace is restored, and the tactful mediator leaves behind her smiles and good humor in place of sullen resentment.

In this case the chief complaint the neighbors brought was that the mother—who was supposed to know so little of our tongue—had used such AWFUL language!

“I didn’t use to be a good woman myself,” said another mother in this court. “My mother didn’t use to be a good woman, either. But now my daughter’s comin’ on, and I want her to be different. I want her to be a Christian. She sings hymns somethin’ lovely.”

In an Italian yard near by are old railway-ties high piled, to be chopped into kindling. In their enthusiasm for saving money, the householders are likely to fill the court as high as the roofs with the beams, if not restrained by the rent-collector’s timely warning that they must leave some room for other purposes.

One of the houses shows menacing patches of brown specks on the plastering of a tiny bedroom—that means the larvæ of vermin. In a hole in the midst of each patch are the live insects. The friendly rent-collector makes a careful note of the fact. There is an evil day in store for this common pest of the tenants in old houses, when the Association shall bring its batteries of formidable disinfectants to bear. The Association is not fond of spreading wall-paper over the surfaces where insects live and thrive.