But most Negroes belong to that economic class which, the world over, pays the heaviest rent in proportion to its income and yields the landlord the largest return on his investment, yet which receives in return little which is compatible with health or decency.
This is the tragedy of the Negro slum. Nobody is trying to abolish it, because nobody believes it can be done. We believe the Negro breeds the slum—instead of the slum breeding many of the Negro’s defects. Everywhere else people are re-creating the slum-dweller by abolishing the slum. We make no effort, partly because, as yet, few of us know of the widespread struggle for better housing the Negro is himself making.
What is needed, Mrs. Hammond believes, is an experiment station in Negro housing in the South. When it is proven, as it surely can be, that Negro day laborers and washerwomen can be decently housed at a fair profit to the landlord, southern money will be invested in houses of the right kind. But somebody must prove it, and advertise the proof far and wide.
The plan by which Paine College hopes to prove it is, in brief, to buy a city block of about six acres in Augusta, Ga., and build on four acres little three-roomed houses, such as day-laborers and washerwomen rent. The houses are to have a sink in every kitchen (water in the house is to this class a luxury unknown), and a toilet, ample window space, closets, and the porch so necessary to family comfort in a warm climate. By building double houses, and four acres full of them at a time, they can be put up for $850 per double house.[1] The rent would be two dollars the room per month, the current rent for that district. The lot for each family would be 20 x 105, which would afford a little garden-space in the rear—a privilege highly esteemed by many of the poorer Negroes, and one which, under the plan proposed, would be a powerful aid in the upbuilding of home and family life.
Four acres of the six-acre block would give room for forty double houses. The other two acres Mrs. Hammond designs to use as a playground for the children, and a site for a community house. This house should contain a kindergarten room and a room for boys’ clubs which could be thrown together at night and used for the recreation and the instruction of the grown people. It should have a room for cooking classes, one for sewing classes, a few free baths for men and women; and a small laundry and drying room, like those in the East End of London, a small weekly payment for the use of which would relieve the mothers from the heaviest of their drudgery, and set free much of their time for home-making. It would also make possible a war of extermination against the accumulations of trash about the ordinary Negro home, where so many abominations are claimed to be necessary for the sake of the pot and fire in the yard “to boil de clo’es.”
Rent would be collected on the Octavia Hill plan, with its concomitant thrift clubs, mothers’, men’s, children’s, and home-improvement clubs, and these clubs would do for the tenants just what it does elsewhere for slum-dwellers of other races. They would, Mrs. Hammond believes, be built up in character, the houses would be saved from the usual degeneration of property rented to this economic class, a good return would be realized on the investment, and the children ultimately turned over to the community as self-respecting and law-abiding instead of furnishing, as is inevitable under present conditions, their full quota of paupers and criminals, to be carried by the taxpayers of the city.
Three rooms would be reserved for the Negro worker, who would not only keep them as a model home, but would use them to train the girls in housework. This would leave seventy-nine three-roomed homes for rent, at six dollars each monthly, a yearly total of $5,688.00. This sum would pay the salary of the social worker, who is a necessity to the success of the plan, and yet yield 10 per cent gross on the investment, though two acres of the land and the settlement house, representing one-fifth of the sum invested would he unproductive from a commercial point of view. This is on the basis of an expense of $9,000 for land, $34,000 for forty double houses and $7,500 for the settlement house, a total investment of $50,500.
Rentals from Negro property now yield a larger gross return than this, as do rentals from similar property elsewhere; but the houses deteriorate so rapidly from misuse that the landlord feels that only an extraordinary profit while they last can insure him against actual loss. A gross return of 10 per cent where the buildings suffered only the depreciation caused by rational use would be as attractive to the ordinary business man here as elsewhere.
Mrs. Hammond’s scheme would be considered part of the educational system of Paine College. Good housing and good living as taught in the settlement and practically applied in the model housing plan would become a part of the school curriculum. The raising of the endowment fund is the present problem of Paine College. The peculiarity of this, as of all other Negro schools, is that the more students it has the poorer it is. Few of the pupils can pay the full amount asked of them, which is itself less than the actual cost of their board and tuition. Some work is furnished them—in kitchen, laundry and household for the girls, in grounds and garden for the boys—by which they partly pay their way. The plan is to have the income from the model housing endowment used to pay poor students for work done and so provide with an education many whom the college is forced now to turn away.
The homes, playground and settlement would furnish a practical field where young Negro women could be trained as social workers in order to meet the growing demand from white people in several southern states for trained Negroes to work among the poor of their own race.