Page:The Ethics of Urban Leaseholds.djvu/14

8 and on the length of frontage so contrived, the extremest subdivision possible for sites of houses, to obtain the greatest rental from the land, is made. The houses are to be the narrowest that the public will, in each locality, endure; and certainly the public are extremely squeezable. The consequences are small incommodious chambers, well called 'sitting' rooms, in which the necessary or unnecessary furniture so occupies the little space that those for whom they are supposed to be constructed ought to be incapable of movement, basement kitchens, dog-leg staircases (most aptly named), few rooms to live in on a floor and many floors of height, the thinnest walls the Building Act permits, abundance of cheap 'decoration,' a fine coat of stucco, with the 'architectural effect' of cornices and columns to distract attention from the meanness of the work, and such a want of liberal adaptation and amenity as quite forbids the sense of comfort, and prevents the house from ever being honoured or rejoiced in as a home.

The ordinary term for building leases is from eighty to a hundred years. Renewals, or new leases on a rack house rent, are generally granted for from twenty-one to forty years. These terms becoming always shorter by the lapse of time, the average present length of London leases is not more than thirty years. Of course, then, a shrewd leaseholder restricts his outlay on improvements and repairs; and probably at length from sheer disgust he sells his houses to some speculator in bad leasehold remanets. They are then treated as mere rent producers, to be crammed with lodger-tenants, and be utterly used up; and in such tenements one half of what are called the floating population live.

The long continuance and the general extension of the leasehold system are an evidence of the habitual neglect of men to study questions which, in some sense public, yet most intimately concern themselves. In this case failure to perceive the obvious connection between a harmless-looking legal document and its widespread damaging effect becomes the