Page:Lectures on Housing.djvu/72

 bounty should not be so arranged as to differentiate in favour of an anti-social distribution of population. There is reason to believe that, in most large towns, the play of economic forces tends to concentrate population more closely than is socially desirable in the central districts. Bounties, therefore, if given at all, should be given in such a way as to counteract, or, at all events not in such a way as to emphasize, that tendency. This seems sufficiently plain. And yet for a long time, the law in some cases enforced, and the London County Council in yet other cases pursued, a line of policy, in which the considerations I have just explained were wholly ignored. Perceiving that the high cost of land in the centre of London made the rents at which workmen's dwellings could be let there abnormally high, the County Council built houses there, wrote off the difference between the commercial value and the value for working-class dwellings of the sites, and offered the houses for hire on