Page:Industrial Housing.djvu/33

 expenditure. Factory wages vary greatly in different occupations, and, from the angle of housing finance, the average in any occupation may be lowered because the statistics of factory wages include the large numbers of very youthful employees of both sexes who are not to be classed as home providers. Furthermore, outside the ranks of factory workers lie certain classes of very highly paid wage-earners, such as the mechanics in the building trades.

Looking at the other side of the picture—that of the lower paid workers—outside the factory classification are the clerical workers, the "white collar class," the government employees, such as policemen, postmen, firemen, street-cleaners, who are in many cases less well-paid than the semi-skilled, or even the unskilled.

Equally important is the fact of considerable variation in income between members of each wage group. After all, the family is the unit in housing, financially or otherwise, and the income of the family may be larger than the wages of the head. In these days when both sexes work, there are often more than one wage-earner in the family. Also, a family may enjoy additional income from savings, from investment in securities or real estate, from inheritance, or from the custom of taking boarders into the home. Clearly, the discrepancy between family income and the wages may be great, and may vary greatly as between families in the same wage group. For this reason it is family budget, not the wage, which is the true index in housing finance.

Equally misleading are those generalizations regarding "the percentage of his wages that a workingman may be expected to pay for rent." How about the prices of the other items in the family budget in a given locality? How about the number of children in a family, and the age of the children, and the expense of rearing and educating them?

All this on the income side. But equally treacherous may be the rent statistics when taken as indices of housing expenditure. As a single illustration, in the case of each individual family there is the question of who pays for the heat and hot water, the landlord or the tenant? Here are two items alone which may equal as much as $2 a room a month in the northern part of the United States, but which may or may not appear in the rental, according as to whether the home is in an individual or row house, a two-family house, a "cold-water flat,"