electricity, which has been particularly large since the war, is also heavily reflected in the price of land, and in taxes and assessments. The experience of the United States Housing Corporation during the war is instructive. This and other cases lead the New York State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning to declare that the cost of public improvements is at least three times that of "raw"—or unimproved—land.
Factor of land utilization
Crude and wasteful methods of utilizing—or of sub-dividing land, as it is called—are a further heavy drain on the homeowner's resources, whether in the cost of procuring or of operating his home. This waste in land sub-division has received much attention in recent years from architects, who have pointed out that the customary methods of plotting home sites usually require an excessive proportion of space to be given over to streets (which are extremely expensive) as compared with that allotted to housing locations; and that, furthermore, the custom of laying out a street system long in advance of the buildings piles up heavy carrying charges on the costly municipal improvements and public services in the street, which lie idle, often for years. The overhead on this heavy waste in street construction and on the premature development of street systems increases the cost of taxes and assessments, as well as the rates for water, gas and electricity; and it also accumulates as carrying charges on the land.
The influence of these various factors which enter into the cost of land are now being subjected to scientific study. They are brought up to date in the 1925 report of the New York State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning in elaborate detail. The Committee on Community Planning of the American Institute of Architects, in their admirable 1925 report, also deals exhaustively with this huge economic waste, and concludes that it can only be stopped by sound community planning. The Committee's report offers a typical example of the waste in streets, showing how, in a tract of 580 acres, in which 190 acres, or 32.8%, are devoted to streets as laid out in the customary way, this high percentage could be reduced by proper design to 23⅓%, effecting thus a saving of 55 acres or nearly 10%, and, at the same time, providing a more efficient and attractive arrangement of home sites.
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