Page:Old Towns and New Needs.djvu/80

 £7. 5s. 0d. per lineal yard, which I am informed is the cost of a Manchester by-law street, and we will allow £1 per lineal yard for the back roads. You will see from the diagram that on 10 acres we can put a total of 340 houses or 34 to the acre. We will take another 10 acres exactly in the same form and here we will reduce the number of houses to 152, i.e., 15.2 per acre. In this case we will not provide back roads but will spread out the houses along the frontage, building them in groups of 2, 4, or 6, and leaving adequate passage way between every two houses to give access to the back gardens. We will take the same cost per yard for the roads and we will assume in both cases that the land, before the roads are made, is worth £500 per acre. We have 10 acres in each case and our land therefore costs us in both cases £5,000; but notice, in Scheme No. 1, our roads cost us £9,747. 10s. 0d., while in Scheme No. 2 our roads only cost us £4,480. 10s. The total cost of land and roads in Scheme No. 1 is therefore £14,747. 10. 0., while in Scheme No. 2 it is only £9,480. 10s. 0d. Dividing that cost by the number of houses in each case we find that the plot in Scheme No. 1, which only measures 83&frac12; square yards of available land for building and back yard, costs £43. 7. 6. or 10s. 4&frac12;d. per yard, while in Scheme No. 2 the plot which contains 261&frac12; yards, more than three times the area, only costs £62. 7s. 5d. or 4s. 9&frac14;d. per yard. That is, we find by reducing the number of houses by more than a half which has the result of increasing the size of our plot more than three times, we have only increased the weekly ground rent by 3&frac34;d. In Scheme No. 1, 8d. per week must be paid for the small plot,