Page:Old Towns and New Needs.djvu/85

 That is, that owing to the increased area of land required for building purposes by reducing the number of houses to the acre from 34 to 15, the owners of land as a whole would receive the same return in increment after allowing for the loss of agricultural value on a larger area, if the land were sold at £248, 8s. 0d. per acre instead of £500 as taken in our figures. If this value were substituted in our scheme 2 calculations, we should find that the ground rent per week would be reduced from 11&frac34;d to 8½d. per week or only one halfpenny more than the cost under the old scheme.

This is not a picked example. I have tried it with dearer and cheaper land, with more costly roads and less costly ones, and though of course the exact relation varies, the general results come substantially to the same thing.

In other words, our over-crowding system of development is so absolutely uneconomical, it wastes so much of the land in roads, that actually it would be possible, giving the landlord the same total return in increment from every house that is built and paying exactly the same for the streets, to provide the plot of land of 261 square yards for 8½d. per week in place of a plot of 83 square yards which costs 8d. per week. If you compare the two diagrams illustrating the space occupied on every acre of ground by roads, by building, and by garden, in each case, you will see somewhat how this remarkable result comes about; how in the one case such a large proportion of the acre is occupied by roads, and you must remember that roads constitute the most expensive form of open space which it is possible to have, and the least satisfactory.