[The Cost of Shelter by Ellen H. Richards]@TWC D-Link bookThe Cost of Shelter CHAPTER III 3/21
Such eyesores as one finds on the trolley-lines in any direction! They may have town-water supply, or they may depend on wells, but they are frequently without sewer-connection. It is costly to be neat and clean, and only those whose minds require such surroundings in order to be comfortable will pay the cost in time, trouble, and money. (3) Some families made a compromise and built what is called a modern house with bath-room and furnace (after the air-tight-stove craze passed), with jigsaw ornamentation outside and in, pretentious-looking dwellings 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.
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