CHAPTER II
The Garden Apartment
THE garden apartment was chosen by the Bayonne Housing Corporation as the type of architecture most suited to wage-earners' housing. Its chief advantages are: economy in production and in operating costs, and in the housewife's labor, convenience of living, and beautiful environment of architecture, garden, and playground. These factors give the wage-earner a home of a far higher standard of living than he can obtain in other housing types.
Economy, of course, is the basis of industrial housing, and there are several reasons for the superior economy of the garden apartment. By grouping several families, one above the other, on the land, it conserves land together with the cost of the municipal services and of the public utilities outside the house itself, which, as explained in the previous chapter, have so heavily increased the cost of a wage-earner's home. As an illustration of this truth, the cost of the assessment for street paving between curbs per family housed in the Bayonne group is approximately $39, as compared with $112 if row houses of sixteen-foot frontage each were built, or as compared with $210 for single houses of thirty-foot frontage.
The garden apartment is more economical than other housing types in building construction because it has a lower cost per family housed. This is because the cost of roof, foundations, cellar, and stairway construction, and of the plumbing, heating and electric installations are spread over several families instead of one or two. This fact scarcely needs illustration. And even if the construction of the apartment is heavier than that of small dwellings, its more substantial character gives to it the advantages of lower depreciation and less fire risk. As pointed out in the previous chapter, one of the main causes of slums is the depreciation on the light, jerry construction of the average workingman's home. The Bayonne housing, on the contrary, embodies the soundest standards of construction, and its workmanship is of the best.
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