Your vote and how to use it

by Gertrude Foster Brown

“Working out” a road tax was never a method which contributed to good roads. The earth roads on which the taxpayer puts his unskilled labor are usually impassable many months of the year.

City Streets: The local government decides where a road or street is needed, and with the consent of a sufficient proportion of the property-owners may purchase or condemn the necessary property. If the owner is not satisfied with the payment offered, appraisers must be appointed to decide the amount that should be paid.

City streets must be maintained by the city government. If a person is injured by the failure of the government to keep sidewalks in repair he has a right to sue the government for damages. The municipal government, on the other hand, may require property-owners to keep their sidewalks in good condition.

Street-cleaning: Since many thousands of children have no playground but the street, the condition in which city streets are kept is of great importance to their health and general welfare. Disease germs are heavy and are most numerous near the ground. If playgrounds could be arranged on the roofs of high buildings the children would be the gainers from the pure air. Unfortunately, the streets in which they play are not usually the ones which are cleaned most frequently by the street-cleaning department. Old and young are disorderly—newspapers, cigarette-butts, and fruit-skins are thrown down anywhere. Streets littered with papers, with dust-laden pieces blowing back and forth, increase the dangers from disease.

Carelessness on the part of the public in throwing things into the streets adds many thousands of dollars to the cost of street-cleaning departments. Every time that a person throws a paper or any object into the street eventually some one else must be paid to pick it up.

Most municipalities have ordinances against littering the streets, but they are often dead letters.

The cleanliness and good order of city streets pay in dollars and cents, in public comfort and convenience, and in a lowered death-rate.

Parks: With the congestion of population that is not confined to New York City or any one part of the State, parks large and small have become a necessity not only for pleasure and beauty, but for the health of the community. In the country people can be out of doors as much as they please, but when families are obliged to live close together, “breathing-places” are of actual physical benefit, especially if they can be green with grass and trees. Communities often awaken to the need of parks too late, after all available places are occupied, when in order to provide the necessary oasis property has to be condemned and often enormous sums of money paid for it.

City Planning: Most of our cities have grown up haphazard without any definite plan of development. As new industries have come in they have brought in large numbers of employees, who have had to be provided with living-places, and a new section of the city has been started. Or a real-estate boom, fostered by some private enterprise, will develop another quarter without consideration for the welfare of the incoming population. As land values advance, in order to squeeze all the profit possible out of this increase, high crowded buildings spring up, planned to house as many people as possible in a restricted area. New York City and many other places are continuing to create new tenement districts in outlying quarters of the city where land is still plentiful.

It is not easy to change congested areas built up in the past, but it is a wrong to coming generations to continue to allow considerations of health and decency to be ignored in the future growth of cities. Haphazard growth has cost the public dearly in actual money values. Unrestricted crowded living conditions have cost still more dearly in the moral and physical vitality of the people who have had to put up with them. These mistakes of the past cannot be remedied, but cities and villages are still growing, and the wise community is now developing a plan in advance for its future growth, which will safeguard public health and welfare, and the convenience as well as the beauty of the city.