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The Cost of Shelter by Ellen H. Richards
page 53 of 105 (50%)
if houses were wiselier done."

When the real twentieth-century house is put up our young engineer and
college instructor will be willing to pay $400 to $500 rent, because wages
and running expenses will be $100 less and the company owning the houses
will not expect more than 4%, largely because repairs will be less and
permanence of tenure more assured. The old type of wooden house used by
the old type of tenant could not be expected to last more than a few
years, which justified a higher rate of interest. For the tenement tenant
of the better class twenty years has been the estimate, so that the cost
of building could not be distributed over fifty years as it should be.

The house will be made of reinforced concrete or its successor; certainly
not of wood. Whether a single house or one of two or more "compartments,"
each family will have a side, that is, the entrance doors will not be side
by side. Such have been built in Somerville, Mass., by a railroad company
for its employees. Those who wish to have a garden may; but no one will be
obliged, for there will be regulations about the general appearance of the
whole park, and every man his own lawn-mower will not be true. The
cultivation of taste will have so far advanced that the grouping advised
by the landscape architect will appeal to the occupant more than his own
fancied arrangement.

Since the heating will be supplied from outside, there will be a hothouse
and cold-frames for those who wish to have a share in the garden, just as
now there are bins in the basement. The care of these may replace the
exercise now gained in scrubbing the front steps. The windows of the house
will be dust-proof, fly-, mosquito-, and moth-proof; the air supplied will
be strained by galleries of screens, if indeed social advance has not
eliminated soot from chimneys and grit from the streets. Most certainly
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