Riches and Poverty (1910)

by L. G. Chiozza Money

It cannot be too strongly insisted that in connexion with the problem of housing the people there is not merely the question of "overcrowding" or of "crowding," whether in rooms or on area, to be considered. Not only death and disease but ugliness and inconvenience have to be fought. The speculative builder is covering suburban areas with mile after mile of amorphous dwellings. Acre after acre of smiling meadow is disfigured. Street after street of buildings of unredeemed ugliness reach out into the beautiful country which lies so near to the 75,000 acres of London. Trees are felled; every particle of verdure is scraped away. The town advances, and before its grim threatenings Beauty flies. The lane becomes the street; the hedge is replaced by cast-iron palings; beyond the hedge there arises the row of "bay windows with venetian blinds" which figure in the advertisements. Pass to the rear and you will find the 16 or 18 feet frontage which the builder thought beautiful balanced by a "back addition" which even the builder knew to be ugly. Facing the back-additions, across two "gardens" together not so long as a cricket pitch, another row of rear elevations, and so on, row after row. Such is the vision with which we stimulate the fancy of the more fortunate of the children of the people. We teach them drawing on the latest principles—free-arm—in the school. We give them infinite ugliness as their environment outside the school. We have still to learn that while the dwellings and surroundings of the people are unlovely we cannot hope for a gifted race. We have yet to understand that education begins when the child opens its eyes and ears to the sights and sounds of the home and its surroundings. It is not alone that the people lack monetary income. To the ill-distribution of wealth is added the ill-distribution of the means of a beautiful life. The majority of our people are denied the vision of beauty, and even those who receive fair wages perish morally for lack of that vision.

From the centre to the circumference there passes all the evil thinking and evil doing which the unnatural conditions of the centre have created in the minds of men. The workman who leaves the centre for the new suburb of Walthamstow is not surprised to find there the ugliness which he left behind him. He does not expect to find Beauty—that is a commodity confined to pictures. He does not wonder that man could be so blind as to create a sore on the borders of one of the most beautiful spots which this earth has to show. He owns his cottage with a smile, oblivious of the might-have-been, and rarely if ever wonders why in a country containing nearly 80,000,000 acres his considerable rental can command so small a share of the surface of his native land.

And surely it is for lack of vision that our efforts in connexion with the housing problem are so misdirected. The rulers of our towns instead of directing their attention to the outskirts have practically confined themselves to tinkering at the centre. Blocks, palatial in size and unholy in principle, have been erected and ironically dubbed "model dwellings." It is true that in all big towns there are a certain number of workmen who must live near their work, but there is usually a far larger number who have no such tie. And the model dwellings referred to usually succeed in housing not the class which must live near their work but the class who could well go out beyond the suburbs. Thus the effect of tinkering in the centre is often but to set free for the poorest of the poor the tenements deserted by the better class who pass to the new dwellings. That is good in its way, but how much better it would have been to relieve the centre by emptying out its streets into the places beyond. To buy up slums in the centre and create model dwellings is to play into the hands of the landlords—to increase the value of the unbought slums. To empty out the centre of its movable population is to leave a better selection of homes for those who must remain, and to leave the slum landlord to mourn a fall in the value of his "property."

A great deal is often said about unoccupied sites in towns and their suburbs and it has even been suggested that efforts should be used to force them into the market and compel building upon them. Here again is exhibited a most lamentable lack of vision. In so far as town sites are unbuilt upon let them remain so, and if their owners are waiting for a rise in value let us take measures to make that waiting prolonged.

In a widely circulated leaflet on the land question I read: "If we pass through the outskirts of any of our great centres of population, we see pieces of land left practically derelict, with perhaps an old horse grazing there disconsolately, or a few hens investigating a rubbish heap. A little farther on we see houses being built and roads being laid out. We know that still more houses are badly wanted, and we wonder why the land between is not being utilized."

Here we have a reformer ardently desirous of filling up an open urban space which, if he were wise, he would use his best endeavour to keep open for ever. Seeing houses being built and roads being laid out "a little farther on"—what kind of houses and what sort of roads, I wonder?—he is anxious to turn out the disconsolate horse and pile up more houses in the intervening space. It apparently does not occur to him that yet "a little farther on" there is land enough for the housing of an army, and that a horse, however disconsolate, is at the worst a prettier object than a speculative builder's "villa."

Two things are necessary if the housing problem is to be grappled with seriously and not resigned to private profit timorously modified by municipal tinkering. The first is the control of land, and the second ready access to capital. As has been truly said, the housing question is a land question; as has been too rarely remembered, it is even more a capital question.

There is only one effective way in which the community can control land and that is to become its landlord. It is also true that there is only one effective way in which the community can keep in its own hands the "unearned increment" arising from the enhanced value of land created by the presence and work of the community, and again that effective way is for the community to own the land. There is no necessity, however, for the town to play into the hands of suburban landlords by purchasing dear land. It can evade attempts to corner land required by the community by going out and beyond that land if it is held for a rise. Indeed it is better to leave a zone between its present circumference and the site of its new housing area. Even in London, it is a simple matter to reach land cheap enough for successful housing operations. It is of the utmost importance that all municipalities should without further delay secure considerable areas of the agricultural lands which surround their townships.[47] By doing this well in advance of their building operations they can insure that, as they themselves raise the value of the land by developing it and establishing means of transit, the whole of that value will remain in their hands. Moreover, if the owners of the intermediate land thus see their market failing they will gladly place a reasonable price upon their holdings. In this connexion it is probable that the taxation of land upon its selling value may prove to be of assistance. The man who controls a part of the area of his country and who will neither use it himself nor allow others to use it should in any case be taxed. I attach more importance, however, to the simple and effective policy of widening the radius of operations until cheap land is reached.

It cannot be too clearly understood that simply to tax land on its selling value is of itself no solution either of the land question or the housing question. If land is priced by its owner at £1,000 per acre and he is holding it to obtain that figure, we should not necessarily bring it into the market by taxing it on its selling value. The price asked obviously includes all the rise in value expected by the present owner in the near future; that is why the price is held out for. If the land be taxed upon the capital value the owner, unless very strong financially, would probably have to sell. To do so, he would reduce the price and the land would be taken up by a second owner. The expected rise in value would thus be discounted, and the second owner having obtained the land at a lower rate, would be able to hold the land for the rise in spite of the tax payable. Thus the tax would not necessarily bring the land into use. Nor, if it did, would it necessarily be devoted to a desirable use. Owner B is not necessarily more moral or public spirited than owner A. Owner A held up the land, but owner B, having bought it, may put it to such base uses that we could wish it had been held up a little longer. Above all, therefore, we must have public control of area.

As the owner of its own sites, the township can be the arbiter of its own developments. This has been clearly recognized in Germany, where, under the encouragement and stimulation of the State governments, municipalities are acquiring land beyond their existing borders. Considerable areas are owned by many German towns. Stettin has 12,500 acres; Mannheim has 5,000 acres; Breslau has 12,000 acres; Frankfort has 11,000 acres.