“How much better in all respects would it be that the owner himself should give some personal supervision to his property and to the state of those who dwell in it.”
And there was another class of “owners”—the middlemen—“the very curse that is incident in all society.”
“There are a great many middlemen dealing with these properties. A great deal of it is to let out in lodgings. A man goes and buys this wretched property at public auction in different parts of London to pay him 10 or 12 per cent., and he underlets it at so much a room to weekly tenants.”
“It is these small men who go into it to make a profit, and screw the poor, wretched holders down to the last farthing—in fact they get as much as they can out of the property, and do as little as they can.”
Some of the Medical Officers of Health referred to the difficulties of getting the “owners” to do anything to keep their property in order.
Thus the Medical Officer of Health for St. James’ wrote (1877–8):—
“On eastern border of parish a large number of houses are now increasingly being underleased in order to be let out as tenement-houses…. Dealers in these houses make enormous aggregate rentals out of the improvident working people whom they thus herd together; and persistent efforts on the part of the sanitary officers are needed to goad some of these ‘landlords’ into keeping their ‘property’ in a decent condition.”
With a very large number of house-owners and other sanitary misdoers, nothing but the vigorous administration of the law would induce them to abate nuisances or do anything for their tenants.
“I am quite sure,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for Hackney in 1880, “that a prompt and strict enforcement of the various sanitary Acts is beneficial not only to tenants, but landlords, because the latter will not allow tenants to occupy their houses who frequently bring them under the notice of the sanitary officers.”