A fair rule is that each room costs $1000 to $2000 to build.
This means that our lowest limit of income, $1000 a year with $200 for rent, can have only two or at most three rooms and bath, and those without elevators and janitor service.

It is only when the income reaches $2000 to $3000 a year that the family may have the advantage of good building in a good locality, and even then it means some sacrifice in other directions.
It is clear that the common theory that a young man must have a salary of $3000 a year before he dares to marry has some foundation when $600 to $800 is demanded for rent.
The increased sanitary requirements have doubled the cost of a given enclosed space, the finish and fittings now found in the best houses have doubled this again, so that it is quite within bounds to say that a house which might have been put up to meet the needs of the day in 1850 for, say, $5000 will now cost $20,000.
Much of the increase is for real comfort and advance in decent living, and so far it is to be commended.

Such part of the increase as is for ostentation, for show and sham, is to be frowned upon, for this high cost of shelter is to-day the greatest menace to the social welfare of the community.

When the average young man finds it impossible to support a family, when the professional man finds it necessary to supplement his chosen work by pot-boiling, by public lectures and any outside work which will bring in money, what wonder that scholarship is not thriving in America?
Pitiful tales of such stifling of effort have come to my ears, and have in large part led me to make a plea for a scientific study of the living conditions of this class, and for a readjustment of ideals to the absolute facts of the situation.
We may give sympathy to those Italians who pay only $2 a month for the shelter of the whole family, but we must give help to the harder case of a family with refined tastes and high ideals who can pay only $200 a year.
In the real country, at a distance from the railroad, air, water, and soil are cheap.

Here a house may be put up with its own windmill or gas-engine to pump water, with its own drainage system, giving all the sanitary comforts of the city house, for about $5000.