Page:Industrial Housing.djvu/32

 of operation he has the same sad experience. Needless to say his carrying charges are heavier than a generation ago, reflecting the higher prices of land, utilities, construction and finance. Worse still, interest charges, which form about one-half of the current expenses, are far higher, as pointed out above. Depreciation, which involves repairs, is higher, because repairs are chiefly an item of skilled labor. Taxes, whether national, state, county, or municipal, are excessive. As an illustration of the importance of this tax factor in housing, in the "$9.00 a month a room" garden tenements of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York City, completed in 1924, the exemption from municipal taxation alone for a period of nine years is figured to be worth at least $1.50 a month a room on the rental; whereas in Bayonne, out of every $10.00 rental paid by the tenant, approximately $2.50 goes into taxes of every sort. Other items of operation cost are the mounting figures of depreciation on house furnishings, and the higher prices for fuel and supplies.

The foregoing pages of this chapter on housing economics have had to do with the prices which the wage-earner pays for housing. But how about his income? Can the wage-earner's budget bear the charge for the normal items of housing expenditure?

In answering this question, the writer does not intend to lead the reader through the usual discussion of rentals versus wages which adorns housing literature. Already too many futile pages have been written on that factor. Nevertheless, it furnishes the key to the finances of any housing enterprise, and it should be understood.

The difficulty with the whole question of the place of housing expenditure in the family budget of a wage-earner is, that it deals with a complicated and endlessly varying set of factors, which are apt to defy generalization. Consequently, in a specific case, the practice of drawing conclusions as to wages, and as to the proportion of wages to be spent for rentals, is apt to lead to exaggeration or to error.

Particularly unfortunate is the practice of basing allowances for rentals on statistics of average factory wages. In a given case, this method may result in setting too low the amount of money in a wage-earner's family which is available for housing