THE COMMUNITY BUILDING
Showing the streets at both sides running into the court. In this building are the small stores, hall, company offices, library, recreation and club rooms, superintendent’s living quarters, social welfare office and medical clinic.
Housing as a War Problem
By A. Raymond Ellis, Architect
A
S the natural result of a general slowing up of building there are not enough houses under construction to take care of the normal increase in the population. The lowest average for new building for ten years was reached last July. Housing bears an important relation to Americanization and civic conditions. For a long time architects have been working toward economic plans for low cost houses for all classes.
Housing conditions have become acute owing to the abnormally large influx of labor to manufacturing centers. After the war it is believed these conditions will be even worse than now. The progressive cities are drawing skilled workers from those that lack economical and comfortable housing, and these cities will be far ahead of many of their competitors in the race for business after the war. The progressive Middle Atlantic states, while newly embarked in manufacturing, have the advantage of newer factories, and with it the opportunity to build the modern type of industrial housing without the attendant handicap of being hemmed in by all kinds of buildings and houses that complicate their problem of expansion, which the Eastern manufacturers have. For them to make a fresh start means an upheaving and alteration of old buildings or a removal to outlying districts, a risky thing in busy times. It has been said America must pay for her inexperience and unpreparedness in these problems, as in many others, and at the same time undertake to solve
them successfully with feverish haste and confusion.
On the occasion of a recent visit to Bridgeport the writer could detect by certain unmistakable signs the haste in which the first industrial houses were built, and the wonderful improvement that followed in the later ones. But Bridgeport has secured large war contracts and with it an influx of perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 workmen, who had to be housed.
Governmental aid in industrial housing has necessarily been given by Germany, England and Italy for many years, because it was a problem that was not interesting financially to individual capital. It was found that private enterprise furnished relief only to the middle classes who could afford to pay fair rents, while the immigrant workingmen, most in need, were left in the slums to become a menace to. society. Governments soon found slums an expensive burden and set about relieving the conditions attendant on overcrowding.
Gerald Trafford Hewitt of the British Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, says that in 1914 David Lloyd-George proposed the most comprehensive national housing scheme ever offered, and one estimated to cost one billion dollars for about one million houses throughout Great Britain; it was based on a careful survey of known needs and financed by Government loans at low rates of interest. British municipalities have already made reforms. Liverpool in 1864 pos
Showing the streets at both sides running into the court. In this building are the small stores, hall, company offices, library, recreation and club rooms, superintendent’s living quarters, social welfare office and medical clinic.
Housing as a War Problem
By A. Raymond Ellis, Architect
A
S the natural result of a general slowing up of building there are not enough houses under construction to take care of the normal increase in the population. The lowest average for new building for ten years was reached last July. Housing bears an important relation to Americanization and civic conditions. For a long time architects have been working toward economic plans for low cost houses for all classes.
Housing conditions have become acute owing to the abnormally large influx of labor to manufacturing centers. After the war it is believed these conditions will be even worse than now. The progressive cities are drawing skilled workers from those that lack economical and comfortable housing, and these cities will be far ahead of many of their competitors in the race for business after the war. The progressive Middle Atlantic states, while newly embarked in manufacturing, have the advantage of newer factories, and with it the opportunity to build the modern type of industrial housing without the attendant handicap of being hemmed in by all kinds of buildings and houses that complicate their problem of expansion, which the Eastern manufacturers have. For them to make a fresh start means an upheaving and alteration of old buildings or a removal to outlying districts, a risky thing in busy times. It has been said America must pay for her inexperience and unpreparedness in these problems, as in many others, and at the same time undertake to solve
them successfully with feverish haste and confusion.
On the occasion of a recent visit to Bridgeport the writer could detect by certain unmistakable signs the haste in which the first industrial houses were built, and the wonderful improvement that followed in the later ones. But Bridgeport has secured large war contracts and with it an influx of perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 workmen, who had to be housed.
Governmental aid in industrial housing has necessarily been given by Germany, England and Italy for many years, because it was a problem that was not interesting financially to individual capital. It was found that private enterprise furnished relief only to the middle classes who could afford to pay fair rents, while the immigrant workingmen, most in need, were left in the slums to become a menace to. society. Governments soon found slums an expensive burden and set about relieving the conditions attendant on overcrowding.
Gerald Trafford Hewitt of the British Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, says that in 1914 David Lloyd-George proposed the most comprehensive national housing scheme ever offered, and one estimated to cost one billion dollars for about one million houses throughout Great Britain; it was based on a careful survey of known needs and financed by Government loans at low rates of interest. British municipalities have already made reforms. Liverpool in 1864 pos