The Cost of Shelter by Ellen H. Richards
page 25 of 105 (23%)
page 25 of 105 (23%)
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with no proper kitchen accompaniments, and an unsavory garbage-barrel in
the small back yard, under the next neighbor's windows. These houses are so close together that sounds and smells mingle; there is so little land that there is no satisfaction in caring for it. Houses of this sort are altogether too frequently found, occupying good locations and jarring on the nerves of the better-trained young people of to-day. What is to be done with them? They are too expensive to pull down, and hence are the last resort of those who find they must retrench. They are mere temporary shelters, not loved homes. The plumbing is usually of a cheap order, and the drains are not infrequently broken, so that sanitarily these dwellings are often more suspicious than the abandoned farmhouse. (4) The influx from village and country made demand for city housing of an inexpensive sort, and there came into being all over the land the type of the family house squeezed by the price of land to four stories high, 16 to 20 feet wide, built in long rows and blocks. The "ugly sixties" bred not only distressful village "villas," but unpleasant city houses of this type, which are to-day a real menace to wholesome living. Many such blocks may be found in any of our older cities, casting a depressing influence upon all who come in sight of them, and deteriorating the manners and morals of all who live in them. For these have gone the way of the other classes mentioned and become perverted from the uses they were designed for. In the seventies there were still motherly women who had come to town to make a home for the children no longer content out of it. They were willing and capable of mothering a few other children and lonely teachers and clerks, so the boarding-house began as a real family home for the homeless. There were not enough of these women to go around, and soon boarding-houses began to be run for profit only. Home privileges were |
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