Good housing that pays /

by Fullerton L. Waldo

Philadelphia is called the City of Homes with good reason. Come into her ample confines from any point you please and you see row upon row of little two-story, stone-stepped houses of red brick, perhaps with a grass-plot front or rear, shade trees in a singular variety, and a certain distinctive contentment and prosperity in the very air above the myriad simmering chimneys.

For all her malodorous misgovernment of time past, whose survivals are being eradicated step by step, with a long stride forward for each disheartening setback, it is a crowning glory of Philadelphia that thousands upon thousands of these little houses have held their own all these years, instead of the teeming, noisome rookeries that are the bane of many another metropolis.

A million people—more than half the population—live in single dwellings.

There are tenements, of recent origin: there is in prospect a tenement problem. But the satisfaction of the developed instinct of the home-builders and housekeepers of Philadelphia does not lie in the direction of the sky-scraping multiple dwelling, which replaces a front porch with a fire-escape, makes a box of geraniums or a rubber-plant do duty for a garden, festoons the vista between towering walls with “the short and simple flannels of the poor,” and suspends the growing child like Mahomet’s coffin half-way between a clouded heaven of grimy skylight or gravelled roof and the cluttered inferno of the pavement far below.

Philadelphia families, accustomed to think of health and comfort largely in terms of the upgrowing generation, prefer privacy to promiscuity, and love their own vine and fig-tree, rising from the ground level, with the tenacious affection that attaches to a patriarchal inheritance. Where the individual home is an impossible luxury, the multiple dwelling that is reared must recognize the right of the family to every procurable blessing and convenience of the single house.

The pages that follow describe the effort of a thoughtful group of Philadelphians to provide cleanly homes and a healthy environment for families in modest circumstances or in self-respecting poverty. This effort—now twenty-one years old—has outgrown the stage of experiment, but it never will deny new light nor wholly abandon, however it may adapt, the ideals that are Octavia Hill’s own spiritual legacy. Who this great and good woman was and what she did for humanity are explained in the opening chapter. The life-story of the work in Philadelphia that perpetuates her name and her influence is next set forth. The reader is then taken into the places where the Association has labored to clean out and to build up in order that sun and air and running water may perform their medicinal offices for body and soul together; that germs and vermin may be routed with the dirt that breeds them; that babies may have a chance to grow into decent and useful citizens; that a sense of neighborliness and interdependence may be fostered even among those whose nationality, religion and language are diverse.

From first to last this is an enterprise of business, and not of charitable dole. We therefore are given to see the “friendly rent-collector” going from door to door, gently but firmly insisting upon payment when the stipulated sum falls due. We find her lending an ear as “guide, philosopher and friend” to a wide category of troubles great and small—none too large and none too minute for her fearless and sympathetic consideration. She does not give alms. She makes no vague and lavish promises of benefits to fall like manna from the skies. She bestows aid upon those who help themselves. She is a walking delegate, not of insurrection and discontent but of courage and self-respect, and the inculcation of thrift and cleanliness and personal responsibility.

We are taken on his rounds with the Superintendent, whose function is the oversight of the work of tearing down and building up, of constructing and of reconstructing, in all its phases. We see that a great deal of the effort of the bricklayer and the carpenter, the plasterer and the plumber, under this shrewd and constant oversight goes to the rebuilding of old houses, and the adaptation of decadent dwellings to the modern advantage of those who have suffered under conscienceless and grinding owners, mindful of profit only.

The work of the Association in the capacity of agent for properties it does not hold is set forth, and the question of the worth-whileness of the undertaking is finally considered.

The writer has been aided without stint at every turn by those whose names appear in the text, and whose self-effacement precludes a proper acknowledgment of their help. He will remember always the mothers and fathers and children met in the course of his social exploration from house to house. He has merely written this little book: they have been the making of it.