An elderly woman who applied for $250 for a rooming house was given $100. She is doing well, but had to incur a heavy debt which by close management, hard work, and with great mental anxiety she has been able to pay off.
A family of five, the father sixty-three, the mother fifty-seven, and their children, were given $150 for a rooming house. They took a six-room flat and by subletting two rooms met their rent. But their plan was to take a larger house which would bring in enough to provide more than the equivalent of rent and which with the supplementary small wages of a son and daughter in their teens, would have made a fair income.
A tailor was given $125 to add to his own limited resources in order to open a shop, but as he couldn’t make good he sold his shop and is now a bushelman.
Favorable Location.
After the fire there was naturally for a time a scarcity of desirable locations for business. With ready money in hand, those applicants who were keen to judge and prompt to act secured the best places, while many were left to take locations with which they were not satisfied and which proved to be unprofitable.
In some instances locations good at first became undesirable through the shifting of the population; certain business centers proved to be but temporary and had to be abandoned like a sinking ship by all who had begun business there. The man who did not have money to move when his first location proved unfit, had to fail or discontinue.
The proportion of re-visited applicants who, having been assisted to engage in business, were still in business, was materially larger among those applicants who, in the judgment of the reviewer, secured satisfactory locations than among those whose locations seemed less favorable. As is suggested in the preceding sentence, the quality of a business location is largely a matter of opinion. If a business succeeds it is easy to conclude that its location is good; if it fails a poor location is a ready excuse. Here, again, a definite estimate is made nugatory by the intrusion of underlying queries relative to the applicants. How adaptable were they? How far sighted? How much initiative had they? To such as were lacking in any of these qualities a favorable location did not always mean success.
Health of Applicants and Families.
Serious illness in the family tended, of course, to interfere with the carrying out of a business plan. The outcome of business rehabilitation in cases where there was no serious handicap of this nature, and in those where such a handicap existed, is shown by [Table 58].
TABLE 58.—BUSINESS STATUS AT THE TIME OF THE RE-VISIT OF APPLICANTS RECEIVING BUSINESS REHABILITATION, BY HEALTH OF FAMILIES.[162]