Company and the Pacific Borax Company, occupied locations near the railroad tracks. Somewhere near these refineries and factories the workers found housing of the sort offered by the local real estate market.
Bayonne was changed by the genii of industry from one end to the other in its physical aspect, and in its social structure it was changed from top to bottom. Formerly a quiet, residential suburb, it suddenly became busy, heterogeneous, industrial. A familiar story, this coming of industry into an old-fashioned city—so familiar, indeed, that its consequences are not heeded. But it is a process of revolution, and cannot avoid leaving scars.
Industry creates problems in housing
New times bring new problems and housing is one of these. In the picture of industrial expansion, as it exists in the minds of most people, housing does not figure prominently. The need of the wage-earner for a home is assumed to care for itself in the market furnished by the local real estate interests. Although all the resources of finance and of technical skill, driven by a relentless impulse for progress, are marshalled to secure the utmost efficiency of manufacturing plants, of railroads, shipping and other transport, as well as of many types of buildings like banks, warehouses and schools, how much science is used to keep the housing of the people abreast of the times?
The increasing complexity of the times and the steady rise in prices now bear very heavily on housing, and, in cities where industrial expansion takes place, breakdowns in housing production are occurring. It is not so much that new houses for the wage-earners are not built, but that such houses as are built are too expensive and of a low standard. Bayonne furnished one of these examples of housing breakdown.
Such was the local situation in 1917, and a new event arrived to precipitate the crisis. This was the entrance of the United States into the World War.
When war was declared, the business leaders in Bayonne knew that the local housing market could not well take care of the renewed influx of workers which would result from the big contracts for war material which were expected at the Bayonne plants. A small group of men, acting at the instance of the Bayonne Chamber of Commerce, undertook to deal
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