The American Architect Wednesday, August 7, 1918 Number 2224
ON WARWICK COUNTY ROAD
Government Industrial Housing
a Business Proposition
D
URING the last two years, because of war costs and war uncertainties, the building of workmen’s houses has been almost at a standstill in this country. This would of itself have caused a widespread, though not acute, housing shortage. It is true that there has been at the same time a great shifting of the population, which would tend to offset this effect. Our young men have been taken out of their home-towns and sent to war, resulting in a lessening, equal throughout the country, of the pressure on existing housing, and a lessening of the demand for new houses for those families of the future which normally would now have been setting up their own homes.
But there has been another movement, far over
balancing the first where it has occurred: the concentrating of much of the free labor of the country into those localities where intensive war work is being carried on. We are all familiar with accounts of the aggravated housing shortage which this has so frequently caused; we read how two or even three men use the same bed in consecutive shifts, how stables, sheds, any and every kind of shelter is pressed into service.
There is plenty of demand for workers at other things than war work; and it is no wonder that a self-respecting man, particularly a man with a family to protect, with children to educate, will choose to work at a “non-essential” industry, where places are left open by those who have gone to the front, rather than, even for high pay or for
Copyright, 1918, The Architectural & Building Press (Inc.)
VOL. CXIV
ON WARWICK COUNTY ROAD
Government Industrial Housing
a Business Proposition
D
URING the last two years, because of war costs and war uncertainties, the building of workmen’s houses has been almost at a standstill in this country. This would of itself have caused a widespread, though not acute, housing shortage. It is true that there has been at the same time a great shifting of the population, which would tend to offset this effect. Our young men have been taken out of their home-towns and sent to war, resulting in a lessening, equal throughout the country, of the pressure on existing housing, and a lessening of the demand for new houses for those families of the future which normally would now have been setting up their own homes.
But there has been another movement, far over
balancing the first where it has occurred: the concentrating of much of the free labor of the country into those localities where intensive war work is being carried on. We are all familiar with accounts of the aggravated housing shortage which this has so frequently caused; we read how two or even three men use the same bed in consecutive shifts, how stables, sheds, any and every kind of shelter is pressed into service.
There is plenty of demand for workers at other things than war work; and it is no wonder that a self-respecting man, particularly a man with a family to protect, with children to educate, will choose to work at a “non-essential” industry, where places are left open by those who have gone to the front, rather than, even for high pay or for
Copyright, 1918, The Architectural & Building Press (Inc.)
VOL. CXIV