Page:Industrial Housing.djvu/21



It is necessary to understand the tangle of economic and human factors which has caused the existing situation in industrial housing. In dissecting the corpse of the housing industry, we soon find, as already stated, that high prices was the disease which killed the patient. Everything that enters into the cost of a home—land, site utilities, building construction, finance, taxes, municipal assessments, household furnishings, maintenance, operation of the completed home—has enormously increased in price. Over the last generation, in nearly all items this increase is over one-half, and in many cases it is double or even triple. The popular impression is that the change in economic conditions after the World War was the cause of the unprecedented increase, but the truth seems to be that the war only served to bring to a head a crisis which had been slowly gathering force for many years. Housing costs have risen, but so have wages, and it is claimed by some students that the wage-earner was not much better off before the war than after it. There are some pitfalls in this claim, as will be pointed out, but it is to a large degree true. At any rate, there is little hope of solving the problem of high costs in housing by