Page:John Nolen--New ideals in the planning of cities.djvu/28

NEW IDEALS IN THE PLANNING OF and avoiding expense by postponing expenditures for these city necessities, for necessities they are. Observation and experience in such matters prove that this is a mistaken view. By such postponement they are merely increasing public expenses, increasing the kind of burden from which the majority of American cities are suffering today. Simply because the value of land in growing cities steadily increases in price, because street widening and the clearing of properties for playgrounds and open spaces involve the destruction of more and more improvements as the years go on, and because the constant rebuilding of public edifices costs more than an adequate building properly and permanently located at first would have cost—simply because of such facts as these is postponement a costly practice. Specific illustrations could be given from a dozen cities to enforce each one of these statements.

Secondly, it should be kept in mind that cities must choose usually between one form of expenditure or another. The people of a city may prefer to pay the direct and indirect cost of epidemics like typhoid fever, pneumonia and Spanish influenza rather than increase the outlay for pure water, better housing, sewers, and other forms of sanitation. They may elect to pay the bills resulting from an inadequate street system for traffic and the convenient circulation of men and goods, rather than make the loans and annual appropriations required by the adoption of a more up-to-date method of locating and improving streets and highways. But does it pay? These same unreflecting individuals may prefer to lay out the money that they must lay out for ignorant, inefficient, diseased and deformed children, for hospitals, asylums, and reformatories, rather than meet the smaller expense of adequate schools, school grounds and playgrounds. It costs only $800 to educate a normal boy in the Boston schools for twelve years, or less than $70 a year. On the