or an apartment with "modern" conveniences. Clearly, the possible error in this item of heat and hot water, amounting to as much as twenty-five per cent in some cases, will invalidate most statistics of rentals. Incidentally, this error has operated to obscure in the minds of most housing experts the superior economy of the apartment house. They see the row house or twofamily house renting often as low as the apartment, but they forget that in one case the tenant pays the fuel item, while in the other the landlord pays it. Repairs are another item of housing expenditure which may or may not appear in rentals.
All these variations in family budget, in items of housing expenditure, and in the relation of housing expenditure to the family budget, demonstrate the pitfalls which occur in the usual generalizations as to rentals and wages. But they should not be allowed to obscure the truth. The one essential fact which stands out clearly in the situation is this, that the traditional methods of housing production have for several decades at least failed to house acceptably all but the more prosperous wage-earners' families in most industrial districts of the United States.
In deciding the housing policy for a specific locality or for a single housing enterprise in respect to rentals and to the number of rooms to be provided, there should be no great difficulty in steering between the variations in different wage groups and in individual families, which seem to conflict. The fact is, that for some time to come, it will be possible to care for the needs of only the more prosperous wage-earners. In almost any industrial district, new low-priced housing of the right kind will not go begging for occupants. And any local group of citizens, desiring to intrust themselves in housing the workers properly, can scarcely expect to do more in the beginning than to establish a local demonstration of sound housing, which will point the way to future progress, and thus set a standard for their district to follow. In accomplishing this necessary and most important task, the way may be opened to reach, little by little, the lower-paid ranks.
As one drops down the economic scale the present failure to properly house the wage-earner becomes more striking. For the family of the semi-skilled worker, for the factory worker's family whose income is hardly larger than average factory wage, for the lower-paid ranks of the "white collar" worker and of the government employee, decent housing in new construction is scarcely to be had to-day anywhere. And as for the housing
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