sabotaged. Then he discovers that the land which is required for daylight, out-door air and for garden and recreation space, is sacrificed to buildings. The buildings are then crowded too close together or are not separated at all. They are built higher. Courts and yards become so constricted that daylight scarcely penetrates his home. The home-owner finds that even that prime necessity of life, access to outdoor air, is denied him.
But this process of physical shrinkage continues. Next it attacks the human values. The standard six-room and fiveroom apartment shrinks to four rooms, then to three. Sanitary conveniences are next eliminated. The fire hazard becomes always graver. At the same time the costs are always mounting and, despite these sacrifices of daylight, comfort, sanitation and safety, the workingman's budget will not afford even the three room home of shoddy inflammable construction, ill-planned, insanitary, gloomy. So he "doubles up." Outsiders—relatives, friends, strangers, even another family—are brought in to share his home. He now lives in a perfect slum. And he pays for that slum about as much as he would for a home in the Bayonne garden apartments.
Be it understood that this picture is not exaggerated. It is a photograph of actual conditions as they are developing in New York City and other congested cities. The testimony on this fact is overwhelming, and is verified by many authorities. And what is happening in these crowded centers must surely take place in other industrial towns and cities in the next few years. In most districts, it is only the plentiful supply of old houses which maintains the rents at a manageable level. But sooner or later the rents in old construction will rise to the level of those in new construction, and, when that happens, the cycle of economic changes which New York City has experienced will be completed in other centers. They, too, will have their slums—square miles of them, in vast "blighted" districts.
The counsel of failure
One of the most unfortunate features in the whole situation in housing is the insidious undermining of human judgment which has taken place in the process. Housing is so complicated a subject, and so new is the technique which has been developed to deal with it, that responsible people do not understand what has happened. Few have visualized the slow change in eco-
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