Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/15

Rh Already I have hinted that interferences with the connection between supply and demand, given up in certain fields after immense mischiefs had been done during many centuries, are now taking place in other fields. This connection is supposed to hold only where it has been proved to hold by the evils of disregarding it: so feeble is men's belief in it. There seems no suspicion that, in cases where it seems to fail, it is because it has been traversed by artificial hindrances. And yet in the case to which I now refer—that of the supply of houses for the poor—it needs but to ask what laws have been doing for a long time past, to see that the terrible evils complained of are mostly law-made.

A generation ago discussion was taking place concerning the inadequacy and badness of industrial dwellings, and I had occasion to deal with the question. Here is a passage then written:

An architect and surveyor describes it [the Building Act] as having worked after the following manner: In those districts of London consisting of Inferior houses, built in that unsubstantial fashion which the New Building Act was to mend, there obtains an average rent, sufficiently remunerative to landlords whose houses were run up economically before the New Building Act passed. This existing average rent fixes the rent that must be charged in these districts for new houses of the same accommodation—that is, the same number of rooms, for the people they are built for do not appreciate the extra safety of living within walls strengthened with hoop-iron bond. Now, it turns out upon trial, that houses built in accordance with the present regulations, and let at this established rate, bring in nothing like a reasonable return. Builders have consesquently confined themselves to erecting houses in better districts (where the possibility of a profitable competition with pre-existing houses shows that those pre-existing houses were tolerably substantial), and have ceased to erect dwellings for the masses, except in the suburbs where no pressing sanitary evils exist. Meanwhile, in the inferior districts above described, has resulted an increase of overcrowding—half a dozen families in a house, a score lodgers to a room. Nay, more than this has resulted. That state of miserable dilapidation into which these abodes of the poor are allowed to fall is due to the absence of competition from new houses. Landlords do not find their tenants tempted away by the offer of better accommodation. Repairs, being unnecessary for securing the largest amount of profit, are not made. ... In fact, for a large percentage of the very horrors which our sanitary agitators are now trying to cure by law, we have to thank previous agitators of the same school!—"Social Statics," p. 384 (first edition).

These were not the only law-made causes of such evils. As shown in the following further passage, sundry others were recognized:

Writing before the repeal of the brick-duty, "The Builder" says: "It is supposed that one fourth of the cost of a dwelling which lets for 2s. 6d. or 3s. a week is caused by the expense of the title-deeds and the tax on wood and bricks used in its construction. Of course, the owner of such property must be remunerated, and he therefore charges 7d. or 9d. a week to cover these burdens." M. C. Gatliff, secretary to the Society for Improving the Dwellings of the Working-Classes, describing the effect of the window-tax, says: "They are now