Page:The Ethics of Urban Leaseholds.djvu/13

Rh infelicitously called ‘improved’ ground-rents. ‘Architects’ and lawyers are employed to let the land, and to invite their clients to ‘advance to builders’ at ‘good interest.’ This goes on, possibly, for years, with good or evil fortune for the speculator; but the builder’s usual course is one of ill-considered enterprise, extravagant expenditure, anticipated profits, and frequent ‘compromise’ or bankruptcy; and for the tradesmen there are heavy risks, completely, or it may be incompletely, covered by insurance prices. ‘Architects’ and lawyers get, of course, their fees; and the confiding client-mortgagee receives, for a few years perhaps, his interest, and then possession of a range of showy-looking houses made of half-baked clay, and mud, and compo, with raw shrinking timber, gaping joiner’s work, foul chimneys, unsound roofs, damp basement rooms, and inefficient drains. The public thus are providently housed.

It must be evident, however, that the method is expensive. The extent of land round London needlessly withdrawn from agriculture, though for years unused for building; the long lines, and even widespread neighbourhoods of carcasses that stand unfinished, and of houses equally unlet, mean grievous loss and waste, which some one has to suffer. Certainly, the builders cannot be the losers; and, in brief, the public pays. When to this dead loss are added all the multiplied and heavy untaxed costs of ‘architects’ and lawyers, the insurance profit, twenty-five per cent, or even thirty, for the tradesmen, and the constant outlay that the rickety and unsound work requires, it must be clear that leasehold house providing is a most extravagant and wasteful system, which, when they learn to understand it, men of sense will not endure.

Besides all this excessive costliness, the houses are themselves a constant tax on physical endurance, and on social comfort and economy. The freeholder’s estate is planned with no regard at all for those who will, by force of leasehold custom, be compelled to suffer in the houses. ‘Architects’ lay out the roads and streets with reference to frontages alone,