|
|
WHAT, then, are the bald facts with which we have to deal in New York?
I. That we have a tremendous, ever swelling crowd of wage-earners which it is our business to house decently.
II. That it is not housed decently.
|
|
III. That it must be so housed here for the present, and for a long time to come, all schemes of suburban relief being as yet utopian, impracticable.
IV. That it pays high enough rents to entitle it to be so housed, as a right.
V. That nothing but our own slothfulness is in the
way of so housing it, since "the condition of
the tenants is in advance of the condition of the
houses which they occupy" (Report of Tenement-house
Commission).
VI. That the security of the one no less than of
the other half demands, on sanitary, moral, and economic
grounds, that it be decently housed.
VII. That it will pay to do it. As an investment,
I mean, and in hard cash. This I shall immediately
proceed to prove.
VIII. That the tenement has come to stay, and must
itself be the solution of the problem with which it
confronts us.
This is the fact from which we cannot get away, however
we may deplore it. Doubtless the best would be to
get rid of it altogether; but as we cannot, all argument
on that score may at this time be dismissed as idle.
The practical question is what to do with the tenement.
I watched a Mott Street landlord, the owner of a row
of barracks that have made no end of trouble for the
health authorities for twenty years, solve that question
for himself the other day. His way was to give the
wretched pile a coat of paint, and put a gorgeous
tin cornice on with the year 1890 in letters a yard
long. From where I stood watching the operation, I
looked down upon the same dirty crowds camping on
the roof, foremost among them an Italian mother with
two stark-naked children who had apparently never
made the acquaintance of a wash-tub. That was a landlord's
way, and will not get us out of the mire.
The "flat" is another way that does not
solve the problem. Rather, it extends it. The flat
is not a model, though it is a modern, tenement. It
gets rid of some of the nuisances of the low tenement,
and of the worst of them, the overcrowding--if it
gets rid of them at all--at a cost that takes it at
once out of the catalogue of "homes for the poor,"
while imposing some of the evils from which they suffer
upon those who ought to escape from them.
There are three effective ways of dealing with the
tenements in New York:
I. By law.
II. By remodelling and making the most out of the
old houses.
III. By building new, model tenements.
Private enterprise--conscience, to put it in the
category of duties, where it belongs--must do the
lion's share under these last two heads. Of what the
law has effected I have spoken already. The drastic
measures adopted in Paris, in Glasgow, and in London
are not practicable here on anything like as large
a scale. Still it can, under strong pressure of public
opinion, rid us of tile worst plague-spots. The Mulberry
Street Bend will go the way of the Five Points when
all the red tape that binds the hands of municipal
effort has been unwound. Prizes were offered in public
competition, some years ago, for the best plans of
modern tenement-houses. It may be that we shall see
the day when the building of model tenements will
be encouraged by subsidies in the way of a rebate
of taxes. Meanwhile the arrest and summary punishment
of landlords, or their agents, who persistently violate
law and decency, will have a salutary effect. If a
few of the wealthy absentee landlords, who are the
worst offenders, could be got within the jurisdiction
of the city, and by arrest be compelled to employ
proper overseers, it would be a proud day for New
York. To remedy the overcrowding, with which the night
inspections of the sanitary police cannot keep step,
tenements may eventually have to he licensed, as now
the lodging-houses, to hold so many tenants, and no
more; or the State may have to bring down the rents
that cause the crowding, by assuming the right to
regulate them as it regulates the fares on the elevated
roads. I throw out the suggestion, knowing quite well
that it is open to attack. It emanated originally
from one of the brightest minds that have had to struggle
officially with this tenement-house question in the
last ten years. In any event, to succeed, reform by
law must aim at making it unprofitable to own a bad
tenement. At best, it is apt to travel at a snail's
pace, while the enemy it pursues is putting the best
foot foremost.
In this matter of profit the law ought to have its
strongest ally in the landlord himself, though the
reverse is the case. This condition of things I believe
to rest on a monstrous error. It cannot be that tenement
property that is worth preserving at all can continue
to yield larger returns, if allowed to run down, than
if properly cared for and kept in good repair. The
point must be reached, and soon, where the cost of
repairs, necessary with a house full of the lowest,
most ignorant tenants, must overbalance the saving
of the first few years of neglect; for this class
is everywhere the most destructive, as well as the
poorest paying. I have the experience of owners, who
have found this out to their cost, to back me up in
the assertion, even if it were not the statement of
a plain business fact that proves itself. I do not
include tenement property that is deliberately allowed
to fall into decay because at some future time the
ground will be valuable for business or other purposes.
There is unfortunately enough of that kind in New
York, often leasehold property owned by wealthy estates
or soulless corporations that oppose all their great
influence to the efforts of the law in behalf of their
tenants. |
|
There is abundant evidence,
on the other hand, that it can be made to pay
to improve and make the most of the worst tenement
property, even in the most wretched locality.
The example set by Miss Ellen Collins in her Water
Street houses will always stand as a decisive
answer to all doubts on this point. It is quite
ten years since she bought three old tenements
at the corner of Water and Roosevelt Streets,
then as now one of the lowest localities in the
city. Since then she has leased three more adjoining
her purchase, and so much of Water Street has
at all events been purified. Her first effort
was to let in the light in the hallways, and with
the darkness disappeared, as if by magic, the
heaps of refuse that used to be piled up beside
the sinks. A few of the most refractory tenants
disappeared with them, but a very considerable
proportion stayed, conforming readily to the new
rules, and are there yet. It should here be stated
that Miss Collins's tenants are distinctly of
the poorest. Her purpose was to experiment with |
|
this class, and her experiment has been more than
satisfactory. Her plan was, as she puts it herself, fair play between tenant and landlord. To this
end the rents were put as low as consistent with
the idea of a business investment that must return
a reasonable interest to be successful. The houses
were thoroughly refitted with proper plumbing. A competent janitor was put in charge
to see that the rules were observed by the tenants,
when Miss Collins herself was not there. Of late gears
sue has had to give very little time to personal superintendence,
and the care-taker told me only the other day that
very little was needed. The houses seemed to run themselves
in the groove once laid down. Once the reputed haunt
of thieves, they have become the most orderly in the
neighborhood. Clothes are left hanging on the lines
all night with impunity, and the pretty flower-beds
in the yard where the children not only from the six
houses, but of the whole block, play, skip, and swing,
are undisturbed. The tenants, by the way, provide
the flowers themselves in the spring, and take all
the more pride in them because they are their own.
The six houses contain forty-five families, and there
"has never been any need of putting up a bill."
As to the income from the property, Miss Collins said
to me last August: "I have had six and even six
and three-quarters per cent. on the capital invested;
on the whole, you may safely say five and a half per
cent. This I regard as entirely satisfactory."
It should be added that she has persistently refused
to let the corner-store, now occupied by a butcher,
as a saloon; or her income from it might have been
considerably increased.
Miss Collins's experience is of value chiefly as
showing what can be accomplished with the worst possible
material, by the sort of personal interest in the
poor that alone will meet their real needs. All the
charity in the world, scattered with the most lavish
hand, will not take its place. "Fair play"
between landlord and tenant is the key, too long mislaid,
that unlocks the door to success everywhere as it
did for Miss Collins. She has not lacked imitators
whose experience has been akin to her own. The case
of Gotham Court has been already cited. On the other
hand, instances are not wanting of landlords who have
undertaken the task, but have tired of it or sold
their property before it had been fully redeemed,
with the result that it relapsed into its former bad
condition faster than it had improved, and the tenants
with it. I am inclined to think that such houses are
liable to fall even below the average level. Backsliding
in brick and mortar does not greatly differ from similar
performances in flesh and blood.
Backed by a strong and steady sentiment, such as
these pioneers have evinced, that would make it the
personal business of wealthy owners with time to spare
to look after their tenants, the law would be able
in a very short time to work a salutary transformation
in the worst quarters, to the lasting advantage, I
am well persuaded, of the landlord no less than the
tenant. Unfortunately, it is in this quality of personal
effort that the sentiment of interest in the poor,
upon which we have to thus given is too apt to be
wasted along with the sentiment that prompted the
gift.
Even when it comes to the third of the ways I spoke
of as effective in dealing with the tenement-house
problem, the building of model structures, the personal
interest in the matter must form a large share of
the capital invested, if it is to yield full returns.
Where that is the case, there is even less doubt about
its paying, with ordinary business management, than
in the case of reclaiming an old building, which is,
like putting life into a defunct newspaper, pretty
apt to be up-hill work. Model tenement building has
not been attempted in New York on anything like as
large a scale as in many other great cities, and it
is perhaps owing to this, in a measure, that a belief
prevails that it cannot succeed here. This is a wrong
notion entirely. The various undertakings of that
sort that have been made here under intelligent management
have, as far as I know, all been successful.
From the managers of the two best-known experiments
in model tenement building in the city, the Improved
Dwellings Association and the Tenement-house Building
Company, I have letters dated last August, declaring
their enterprises eminently successful There is Do
reason why their experience should not be conclusive.
That the Philadelphia plan is not practicable in New
York is not a good reason why our own plan, which
is precisely the reverse of our neighbor's should
not be. In fact it is an argument for its success.
The very reason why we cannot house our working masses
in cottages, as has been done in Philadelphia--viz.,
that they must live on Manhattan Island, where the
land is too costly for small houses--is the best guarantee
of the success of the model tenement house, properly
located and managed. The drift in tenement building,
as in everything else, is toward concentration, and
helps smooth the way. Four families on the floor,
twenty in the house, is the rule of to-day. As the
crowds increase, the need of guiding this drift into
safe channels becomes more urgent. The larger the
scale upon which the model tenement is planned, the
more certain the promise of success. The utmost ingenuity
cannot build a house for sixteen or twenty families
on a lot 25 x 100 feet in the middle of a block like
it, that shall give them the amount of air and sunlight
to be had by the erection of a dozen or twenty houses
on a common plan around a central yard. This was the
view of the committee that awarded the prizes for
the best plan for the conventional tenement, ten years
ago. It coupled its verdict with the emphatic declaration
that, in its view, it was "impossible to secure
the requirements of physical and moral health within
these narrow and arbitrary limits." Houses have
been built since on better plans than any the committee
saw, but its judgment stands unimpaired. A point,
too, that is not to be overlooked, is the reduced
cost of expert superintendence--the first condition
of successful management--in the larger buildings. |
|
The Improved Dwellings
Association put up its block of thirteen houses
in East Seventy-second Street nine years ago.
Their cost, estimated at about $240,000 with the
land, was increased to $285,000 by troubles with
the contractor engaged to build them. Thus the
Association's task did not begin under the happiest
auspices. Unexpected expenses came to deplete
its treasury. The neighborhood was new and not
crowded at the start. No expense was spared, and
the benefit of all the best and most recent experience
in tenement building was given to the tenants.
The families were provided with from two to four
rooms, all "outer" rooms, of course,
at rents ranging from $14 per month for the four
on the ground floor, to $6.25 for two rooms on
the top floor. Coal lifts, ash-chutes, common
laundries in the |
|
basement, and free baths, are
features of these buildings that were then new
enough to be looked upon with suspicion by the
doubting Thomases who predicted disaster. There
are rooms in the block for 218 families, and when
I looked in recently all but nine of the apartments
were let. One of the nine was rented while I was
in the building. The superintendent told me that
he had little trouble with disorderly tenants,
though the buildings shelter all sorts of people.
Mr. W. Bayard Cutting, the President of the Association,
writes to me:
"By the terms of subscription to the stock before
incorporation, dividends were limited to five per
cent. on the stock of the Improved Dwellings Association.
These dividends have been paid (two per cent. each
six months) ever since the expiration of the first
six months of the buildings operation. All surplus
has been expended upon the buildings. New and expensive
roofs have been put on for the comfort of such tenants
as might choose to use them. The buildings have been
completely painted inside and out in a manner not
contemplated at the outset. An expensive set of fire-escapes
has been put on at the command of the Fire Department,
and a considerable number of other improvements made. I regard: the experiment as eminently successful
and satisfactory, particularly when it is considered
that the buildings were the first erected in this
city upon anything like a large scale, where it was
proposed to meet the architectural difficulties that
present themselves in the tenement-house problem.
I have no doubt that the experiment could be tried
to-day with the improved knowledge which has come
with time, and a much larger return be shown upon
the investment. The results referred to have been
attained in spite of the provision which prevents
the selling of liquor upon the Association's premises.
You are aware, of course, how much larger rent can
be obtained for a liquor saloon than for an ordinary
store. An investment at five per cent. net upon real
estate security worth more than the principal sum,
ought to be considered desirable."
The Tenement House Building Company made its "experiment"
in a much more difficult neighborhood, Cherry Street,
some six years later. Its houses shelter many Russian
Jews, and the difficulty of keeping them in order
is correspondingly increased, particularly as there
are no ash-chutes in the houses. It has been necessary
even to shut the children out of the yards upon which
the kitchen windows give, lest they be struck by something
thrown out by the tenants, and killed. It is the Cherry
Street style, not easily got rid of. Nevertheless,
the houses are well kept. Of the one hundred and six
"apartments," only four were vacant in August.
Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman, the secretary of the
company, writes to me: "The tenements are now
a decided success." In the three years since
they were built, they have returned an interest of
from five to five and a half per cent. on the capital
invested. The original intention of making the tenants
profit-sharers on a plan of rent insurance, under
which all earnings above four per cent. would be put
to the credit of the tenants, has not yet been carried
out.
A scheme of dividends to tenants on a somewhat similar
plan has been carried out by a Brooklyn builder, Mr.
A. T. White, who has devoted a life of beneficent
activity to tenement building, and whose experience,
though it has been altogether across the East River,
I regard as justly applying to New York as well. He
so regards it himself. Discussing the cost of building,
he says: "There is not the slightest reason to
doubt that the financial result of a similar undertaking
in any tenement-house district of New York City would
be equally good. . . . . High cost of land is no detriment,
provided the value is made by the pressure of people
seeking residence there. Rents in New York City bear
a higher ratio to Brooklyn rents than would the cost
of land and building in the one city to that in the
other." The assertion that Brooklyn furnishes
a better class of tenants than the tenement districts
in New York would not be worth discussing seriously,
even if Mr. White did not meet it himself with the
statement that the proportion of day-laborers and
sewing-women in his houses is greater than in any
of the London model tenements, showing that they reach
the humblest classes. |
|
Mr. White has built
homes for five hundred poor families since he
began his work, and has made it pay well enough
to allow good tenants a share in the profits,
averaging nearly one month's rent out of the twelve,
as a premium upon promptness and order. The plan
of his last tenements, reproduced on p. 292, may
be justly regarded as the beau ideal
of the model tenement for a great city like New
York. It embodies all the good features of Sir
Sydney Waterlow's London plan, with improvements
suggested by the builder's own experience. Its
chief merit is that it gathers three hundred real
homes, not simply three hundred families, under
one roof. Three tenants, it will be seen, everywhere
live together. Of the rest of the three hundred
they may never know, rarely see, one. Each has
his private frontdoor. The common hall, with all
that it stands for, has disappeared. The fire-proof
stairs are outside the house, a perfect fire-escape.
Each tenant has his own scullery and ash-flue.
There are no air-shafts, for they are not needed. |
|
Every room, under the admirable arrangement of
the plan, looks out either upon the street or
the yard, that is nothing less than a great park
with a play-ground set apart for the children,
where they may dig in the sand to their heart's
content. Weekly concerts are given in the park
by a brass band. The drying of clothes is done
on the roof, where racks are fitted up for the
purpose. The outside stairways end in turrets that give the buildings a very smart appearance.
Mr. White never has any trouble with his tenants,
though he gathers in the poorest; nor do his tenements
have anything of the "institution character"
that occasionally attaches to ventures of this
sort, to their damage. They are like a big village
of contented people, who live in peace with one
another because they have elbowroom even under
one big roof.
Enough has been said to show that model tenements
can be built successfully and made to pay in New York,
if the owner will be content with the five or six
per cent. he does not even dream of when investing
his funds in "governments" at three or four.
It is true that in the latter case he has only to
cut off his coupons and cash them. But the extra trouble
of looking after his tenement property, that is the
condition of his highest and lasting success, is the
penalty exacted for the sins of our fathers that "shall
be visited upon the children, unto the third and fourth
generation." We shall indeed be well off, if
it stop there. I fear there is too much reason to
believe that our own iniquities must be added to transmit
the curse still further. And yet, such is the leavening
influence of a good deed in that dreary desert of
sin and suffering, that the erection of a single good
tenement has the power to change, gradually but surely,
the character of a whole bad block. It sets up a standard
to which the neighborhood must rise, if it cannot
succeed in dragging it down to its own low level.
And so this task, too, has come to an end. Whatsoever
a man soweth, that shall he also reap. I have aimed
to tell the truth as I saw it. If this book shall
have borne ever so feeble a hand in garnering a harvest
of justice, it has served its purpose. While I was
writing these lines I went down to the sea, where
thousands from the city were enjoying their summer
rest. The ocean slumbered under a cloudless sky. Gentle
waves washed lazily over the white sand, where children
fled before them with screams of laughter. Standing
there and watching their play, I was told that during
the fierce storms of winter it happened that this
sea, now so calm, rose in rage and beat down, broke
over the bluff, sweeping all before it. No barrier
built by human hands had power to stay it then. The
sea of a mighty population, held in galling fetters,
heaves uneasily in the tenements. Once already our
city, to which have come the duties and responsibilities
of metropolitan greatness before it was able to fairly
measure its task, has felt the swell of its resistless
flood. If it rise once more, no human power may avail
to check it. The gap between the classes in which
it surges, unseen, unsuspected by the thoughtless,
is widening day by day. No tardy enactment of law,
no political expedient, can close it. Against all
other dangers our system of government may offer defence
and shelter; against this not. I know of but one bridge
that will carry us over safe, a bridge founded upon
justice and built of human hearts.
I believe that the danger of such conditions as are
fast growing up around us is greater for the very
freedom which they mock. The words of the poet, with
whose lines I prefaced this book, are truer to-day,
have far deeper meaning to us, than when they were
penned forty years ago:
"--Think ye that building shall endure
Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?" |
|
Go to Appendix |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|