Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Wealth and Income of the American People (1924).pdf/110

88 should be wide variations is but natural in view of the differences among the definitions of what constitutes the family. An economic definition of the family is the group of persons who derive their support from one income. Conforming to that definition, Dr. W. I. King estimates the ratio of total population to the number of families as 3.3:1, which would indicate about 30,800,000 families in 1916. A ratio commonly used is 4:1, which would indicate about 25,400,000 families in 1916. The New York Tenement House Department reckons four persons per apartment. Using the latter and lower figure I may estimate 25,400,000 houses and apartments occupied at that time, whereof about 6,400,000 were on farms and 19,000,000 were used by other people. Under normal conditions there is a surplus of houses and properly so. There is a definite figure for the position in this respect in 1916 in the statistics of the Tenement House Department of the City of New York, which shows that 5.6 per cent of the apartments of the metropolis were idle at that time. Assuming 5 per cent for the whole country, the total number of urban houses and apartments in 1916 may be reasonably estimated at 20,000,000.

The population of the country up to 1916 was increasing at the rate of 1,200,000 to 1,600,000 per annum, which would indicate the need for somewhere from 300,000 to 400,000 new houses and apartments annually, substantially wholly in the towns and cities, for as has been previously pointed out the agricultural population has not been increasing materially in