In this instance the
heating and hot-water supply was made possible by a combination with
factory plant. But if a larger group of, say, one hundred houses were run
by a central establishment, the Morris Building Company estimates the cost
at about fifty dollars per year.
These houses will be referred to again under Chapter VI, but the especial
value of this experiment was its social significance. How much better to
keep desirable land for residential purposes by such means than to permit
families to move away and give up satisfactory dwellings solely because
the lower end of the street has a few foreigners! Our older cities abound
in instances of this quick abandonment of most desirable streets without
any concerted effort to retain their character.
The dangerous sanitary degeneration of these abandoned houses is one of
the worst features of the situation and a prolific cause of the
overcrowding of cities.
The more thoughtful students of progressive tendencies are grouping
themselves in "parks" where houses are put up with the aid of the
capitalist under such restrictions as to price as is supposed to insure a
congenial neighborhood, and under such regulations as to land as to
prevent manufacturing establishments.
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