UC-NRLF 
 
 HOUSING 
 PROBLEM 
 IN TEXAS 
 
 A STUDYOF PHYSICAL 
 CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH 
 THE OTHER HALF LIVES 
 
 PREPRINTED FROM THE * 
 GALVESTON-DALLAS NEWS 
 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER,I9II 
 
GIFT OF 
 
 

V ' 
 
 The Housing Problem in Texas 
 
 This pamphlet is issued by the publishers of The News to 
 supply a demand for copies of a series of articles written by 
 George Waverley Briggs, a member of The News staff, deal- 
 ing with housing systems that prevail in the leading cities of 
 Texas, to note their deficiencies and advantages, and to sug- 
 gest means of correcting present evils and preventing future 
 complications. The series was originally published in The 
 Galveston-Dallas News November iQ-December 17. 
 
 SERIOUS PROBLEM OF HOUSING THEIR 
 
 PEOPLE CONFRONTS TEXAS CITIES 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 19.) 
 
 Pointing his index finger into the attentive faces of a mass meeting of Dal- 
 las men last Sunday, Dr. Charles Stelzle of New York fervently exclaimed: 
 
 "I insist that you give the workingman a square deal!" 
 
 Unquestionably the doctrine of the square deal is the secular creed of the 
 American people. Founded upon the principle of "equal rights to all, special 
 privileges to none," the Nation has unbarred its doors to the world's downtrod- 
 den and oppressed, with the invitation: "Come and find, refuge here." In the 
 American heart the milk of human kindness is not congealed. Sympathy for the 
 poor and the lowly is an emotion universally latent and quickly stirred under 
 impulse, though it has not borne in its practical, helpful expression the fruits of 
 constancy. 
 
 The workingman does not desire pity. His American independence revolts at 
 paternalism. What he wants is co-operation. All he asks is a chance to win his 
 way by his own thrift and industry a chance which, when -given him. becomes 
 the embodiment of the square deal, the practical and most commendable expres- 
 sion of that sympathy which is latent in the American heart. 
 
 It is deplorable, yet true, that this chance is often denied him. The policy of 
 the square deal is more the professed than the practiced creed of the people, 
 though their vaunted allegiance to it is the resonant shibboleth of their democ- 
 racy. And yet their temperament, their invariable response to worthy agitation, 
 their private charities and philanthropies, undeniably establish as true the propo- 
 sition that their indifferent attitude is neither studied nor heartless, but is rather 
 the consequence of ignorance of conditions and of unintentional neglect of them 
 in their phantom chase of business. 
 
 These National characteristics are exemplified in the people of Texas. The 
 State has enjoyed abundant prosperity. Its population has increased rapidly un- 
 der the lure of its fertile fields to the homeseeker from colder and less pleasing 
 climes. Throughout its vast and fertile farming areas the jocund God of Plenty 
 has filled its cup of fruitfulness. The boundless ranges of the West have made 
 way for little farms where happy, industrious families abide, content in the joy 
 of wholesome work and righteous living. 
 
 Factories have come to its cities. Railroads have contributed to its com- 
 mercial importance in the marts of the world. Big business and little^ business 
 have assisted its prosperity and made of it a land of commercial and industrial 
 richness and productiveness. > rv p~r\ /* /> 
 
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4 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 PUBLIC HAS NOT SEEN OPPORTUNITY. 
 
 Its people are high-minded and loyal to principle. Their hospitality is 
 proverbial, even in the South, where hospitality has long been the watchword of 
 the home. Their benevolence is far-reaching and without stint. Charity is the 
 symbol of their religion and the creed of their lives is the doctrine of the square 
 deal. Where opportunity offers, that policy is applied, ever willingly, ever readily 
 and without restriction or discrimination. But it has been in perceiving the op- 
 portunity that Texans have become near-sighted. They see the opportunity of 
 applying the square deal immediately around them. To their neighbors its 
 practice is never withheld. But not knowing in the first instance, it has, per 
 haps, never been suggested to them to find opportunity for the square deal in 
 the alleys, in the factory sections of the town, in the homes where unskilled 
 working people live in short, in those neglected quarters where respectability 
 and an unfair deal are in constant, embittered and unrelenting conflict. Brought 
 into conflict not primarily by the habits of the people, but by conditions of living 
 which a neglectful public has imposed upon them, these forces are at work in- 
 cessantly and society must pay the penalty, whatever it may be. 
 
 There is no intention on the part of Texans to neglect the workingman. They 
 are merely not acquainted with his condition. They know nothing of the chief 
 and intimate obstacles of his life over which he can not climb without the co- 
 operation of the rest of the community. They are willing to assist him to adjust 
 his labor differences when their gravity impresses them sufficiently to distract 
 them from their occupations. If his family is in want, their purses are generously 
 open to his needs. But beyond that thev have not gone, largely because they 
 nave not known, and in pursuing their philanthropies they have almost invariably 
 overlooked the fundamental element in his life the house he lives in. 
 
 Widespread attention to his home becomes now the surest means of apply- 
 ing to the laboring man the principle of the square deal. Give him relief from 
 the crowded hou c e, equip him with facilities of housing necessary to the proper 
 rearing of his children for clean and healthy living and to the promotion of that 
 abiding happiness which it is his right to enjoy; in short, make of his living place 
 a home in every sense of that endearing word, and the first long step shall have 
 been taken toward administering to him the help he wistfully desires, the right he 
 justly demands a square deal. 
 
 This is the phase of the housing question that concerns the workingman him- 
 self. The problem is thus perceived through the perspective of philanthropy. 
 Yet, aside from the altruistic motive that prompts assistance to him, there is in 
 the movement for better housing the practical idea of self-adyancement a vital 
 consideration of society as a whole, which has too long been regarded as a 
 work of destiny, insusceptible of human influence and not demanding it. How- 
 ever, leading minds, recognizing the virtue of Mr. Roosevelt's truism, "We all 
 go up or down together," have perceived the need of accelerating the normal de- 
 velopment of society by eliminating its artificial retardents and controlling those 
 natural backward tendencies which assert themselves when conditions of life are 
 permitted to fall below the normal. 
 
 NATION'S SEED SOWN IN HOME. 
 
 Seeking to discover the principal source of agencies that exert both baneful 
 and benevolent influences upon society's growth, investigation of sociologists has 
 led them to the home. Their two-fold purpose has been to arrest the evil and 
 to promote the good, relying for beneficial results upon the well-grounded trust 
 that racial progress may be hastened in proportion to the employment of wisdom 
 and experience in directing aright the channels of socinl tendencies. They have 
 found that at the hearthstone the seeds of the Nation are ^own. There, nur 
 tured by wholesome influences, through normal evolution they germinate and 
 bloom into the fruit of substantial progress; or, embedded in toxic cultures that 
 have been caused by ignorance and negleci, they degenerate into prolific sources 
 of vice, crime and social retrogression. 
 
 Upon a moment's reflection it will be accepted that the home and its influ 
 ence are responsible for the character of the Nation its mental, moral and physi- 
 cal vigor or decrepitude. The proverb, "As the twig is bent so i? the tree in- 
 clined," has become the law of the moral as well as the natural world, and the 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 5 
 
 deeper investigators delve into the effects of the inevitable application of this rule 
 the more responsible and important becomes in their eyes the labor of bending 
 the twig aright. 
 
 Briefly, therefore, the primary consideration of self-interest in current housing 
 reforms is the betterment of conditions that surround the citizens of tomorrow 
 the children of today. The underlying purpose is to rear a Nation of sturdy, self- 
 respecting and self-reliant men and to reduce to the minimum those conditions 
 of early life that frequently force their victims into pathways of abject poverty 
 and degradation. The champion of good housing for the unskilled workingman 
 is laboring not so much for the present as for the future. 
 
 Housing reform recognizes another principle in the solution of its problems. 
 Organized charity frequently teaches that it is to the worthy alone that its efforts 
 should be directed. It justifies this contention upon the ground that charity 
 dispensed among unworthy recipients becomes merely an invitation ro shiftless- 
 ness and sloth. Yet experience has taught that the menace to society is not 
 from its worthy poor. It is the unworthy, the very flotsam and jetsam of the 
 social tide, which comprises the social incubus. The accepted theory of hous- 
 ing reform, therefore, does not discriminate between the good and the bad. It 
 deals with both as inseparable components of a section of the community whose 
 condition of living must be bettered for the general welfare; because the entire 
 community is affected by the condition of its component parts. 
 
 Texas has its housing problem. In respect of many elements it is unique. 
 It will be the effort of this series of articles to show a few pen pictures and il- 
 lustrations of housing conditions prevailing in this State, that the citizens them- 
 selves may know with what problems they will have to deal eventually if not 
 presently. Together with these, remedies will be suggested, culled from the besr 
 wisdom and experience of the age, in the hope that they will be of assistance to 
 Texans in solving problems of their own. 
 
 INATTENTION TO HOUSING CAUSED 
 
 NEW YORK'S "HORRIBLE EXAMPLE" 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 20.) 
 
 Texans. perhaps, are familiar with social conditions that prevail in the more 
 congested centers of population. The housing problem has been a favored 
 topic of newspaper and magazine writers for a long while. The sympathy of 
 the Nation, when its attention has been suddenly concentrated upon evils as 
 they exist, has been freely extended. Society recognizes these evils, has long 
 regretted their existence, but it has been slow to act; and, in consequence of 
 its sluggishness, New York, Boston, Cincinnati and other cities of the Nation 
 are today facing problems vitally affecting the welfare and destiny of large parts, 
 if not all, of their citizenships, the final and adequate solution of which can not 
 be definitely foreshadowed even by the energy and the money that are being 
 expended toward its attainment. Society begins to realize that it has too long 
 deferred the settlement of social problems which, when formative, were of easy 
 solution, but which, when formed and crystallized into concrete resistance to 
 remedial measures, are of difficult mastery. 
 
 Stati c tics have proven that the most densely populated city, in the world 
 is Xcw York. Conditions there are without parallel, no city of the old world 
 nor of the new affording so horrible an example of the evils of inadequate 
 housing as does the American metropolis. New York houses the great mass 
 of its working people in tenements, reaching far into the air and extending for 
 miles throughout the city. Congestion and overcrowding reach the depths of 
 their evil there. Nowhere has there been such disregard of light and air and 
 conditions of health and decency in the dwellings of human beings. More than 
 two-thirds of the inhabitants of the cit> live in multiple dwellings. There are 
 more than one hundred thousand separate tenement houses. The statement is 
 made by Lawrence Veiller. who has made a life-long study of the 
 subject, that "we have over ten thousand tenement houses of the hope- 
 less and discredited 'dumb-bell' type with narrow 'air shafts' furnishing neither 
 sunlight nor fresh air to the thousands of people living in the rooms openina 
 
8 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 on them; we have over twenty thousand tenement houses of the older type in 
 which most of the rooms are without light or ventilation; we have over one 
 hundred thousand dark, un ventilated rooms without even a window to an ad- 
 joining room; we have eighty thousand buildings, housing nearly three million 
 people, so constructed as to be a standing menace to the community in the event 
 of fire, most of them built with wooden stairs, wooden halls and wooden floors, 
 and thousands built entirely of wood. Over a million people have no bathing- 
 facilities in their homes; while even a greater number are limited to the use 
 of sanitary conveniences in common with other families, without proper privacy; 
 over a quarter of a million people had in 1900 no other sanitary conveniences 
 than antiquated yard privies; and even today two thousand of these privy sinks 
 still remain, many of them located in densely populated districts, a source of 
 danger to all in the neighborhood, facilitating the spread of contagious disease 
 through the medium of the common house-fly." 
 
 ROOTS OF TROUBLE WERE SMALL. 
 
 This is modern New York. To be sure the picture is appalling; and yet no 
 investigation which may be pursued will reveal better and more forcefully the 
 insidious and subtle encroachment of popular congestion than will a brief study 
 of these conditions, together with a reference to the history of their develop- 
 ment. A moment's reflection will make it impossible to cast the figures aside 
 with the remark, "Oh, well, that's New York, and we have nothing like that and 
 doubtless never will have." 
 
 Before the War of 1812 New York had less than one hundred thousand in- 
 habitants. Its territory was more than suffcient to take care of them 
 and apparently to accommodate all normal increases. It has frequently been 
 said that New York did not apprehend the coming of congested conditions until 
 it awakened one morning to the disconcerting fact that it had no adequate 
 place to house the greater mass of its people. After hostilities had ceased and 
 the United States had re-established its stability as a Nation offering homes anc' 
 civil liberty to all who might desire them, foreigners crowded the 
 port with the arrival of every ship and located themselves in the city in search 
 of a livelihood. 
 
 The situation was allowed to adjust itself after a haphazard fashion. There 
 was no systematic planning of accommodations for the increasing population. 
 The idea of city planning had not been born. New York was short-sighted. It 
 did not penetrate the future and provide early preventive measures to control 
 conditions that subsequently overwhelmed it. 
 
 As late as 1835. seventy-six years ago. it was within the power of New York 
 to control its social situation. In that year its population numbered only 270,000. 
 Problems that were rooted in the town of less than 100.000 were given no greater 
 attention by the city of 270.000. 
 
 Its tenement house problem was growing but not grown. The old homes 
 of the Knickerbockers, the elite of the early colony, which had been vacated as 
 the encroachment of the business districts drove their affluent occupants farther 
 toward the quietude of rural precincts, were converted into makeshift lodging 
 .houses to accommodate as many families and persons as their physical limita- 
 tions would allow. The plan of the tenement house began to ramify through. nit 
 the city. The tide of immigration continued. The situation grew from bad to 
 worse. And soon NCAV York found itself confronted by irremediable conditions 
 that have made the world stand aghast. They developed, too, in less than the 
 period of three score years and ten, the allotted span of human life. 
 
 It is not necessary to go further into the .housing problem of Xew York. 
 As far back as this generation of readers can remember New York has been the 
 "horrible example" of social neglect. The instance is cited merely to impress 
 the fact that New York's tenement problem the wor t in the civilized world 
 was conceived in the error of nnpreparedness. Neglect at a time when atten- 
 tion and the employment of judicious wisdom could have prevented or largely 
 restrained the evils that have grown up, is now claiming its compensation in the 
 unrelaxing and discouraging battle through which the citv hopes by courageous 
 preseverance and fabulous expenditures of money to attain ev, ritual solution of 
 its greatest problem. 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 9 
 
 THE ANALOGY BROUGHT HOME. 
 
 From this should be gleaned the single thought that when the present tene- 
 ment evils of New York took root, the metropolis was not superior in numbers 
 of people to the Dallas, the San Antonio, the Houston of today. 
 
 Ponder for a moment upon what that means. 
 
 New York's troubles began, not in the form of metropolitan problems, but 
 in the insidious and deceptive guise of conditions that confront the growing 
 towns of Texas right now. 
 
 The same inexorable laws are at work in Texas, whose disregard brought 
 shame to New York. They can be ignored in Texas with no more security 
 against evil consequences than they were in New York. 
 
 It is true that at the present there is no city in Texas which has a serious 
 problem WHERE to house its people. Neither did New York have that problem 
 seventy-five years ago. 
 
 But almost without exception the leading cities of Texas indisputably have 
 even now the problem HOW to house their people. 
 
 This being true, the experience of New York, Boston, Cincinnati and others 
 of their class, which have grown in less than one hundred years from comfort- 
 able towns to seething masses of congested humanity, jambed into areas too 
 small to accommodate adequately half the number of their people, should 
 quicken the sensibilities of citizens of Dallas, of Galveston, of Houston, to the 
 unquestionable possibility that one hundred years may bring them face to face 
 with a baffling social predicament. 
 
 The wise Health Department guards against smallpox or cholera before its 
 unsuspecting dependents are in the fell clutch of epidemic. Discovery of endemic 
 cases spurs the health guardians to prevent by quarantine and isola- 
 tion that which they could not, perhaps, control or cure when its 
 magnitude had grown to epidemic state. This is the only successful theory of 
 treating evils which are the^outgrowth of bad housing conditions. They must 
 be forestalled; it is too difficult to cure they after they have developed. New 
 York has thrown up its hands with the wail, "The tenements are with us to 
 stay; we must do the best we can and hope." 
 
 Under the prevailing system of values even the lives of human beings can 
 not be weighed against stupendous financial destruction. It would bankrupt 
 New York to destroy its tenements. Once rooted, therefore, evil housing condi- 
 tions resist and defy drastic and persistent efforts to eradicate them. Conse- 
 quently, the thought should suggest itself that it is by far simpler to build 
 houses properly for the unskilled working people, to establish adequate regula- 
 tions governing their maintenance, and to correct forming evils before they be- 
 come unmanageable through their accretions of strength from inattention and 
 neglect, than it would be to deal successfully with the tremendous task which 
 continued neglect may have brought about. 
 
 It is, therefore, the wise city that will look about it, determine what its 
 deficiencies are. inaugurate measures to repair them and to provide means for 
 the continued development of its physical parts along logical, constructive, well- 
 defined lines, leaving, if possible, no opportunity for chance to work unexpected 
 harm. 
 
 In short, Dallas and Galveston, San Antonio and Houston and all the cities 
 of Texas, now while they may, should profit by New York's "horrible example." 
 In years to come it may be too late. 
 
 TEXAS CITIES HAVE TENEMENTS 
 
 SHOCKING IN THEIR INADEQUACIES 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 21.) 
 
 There are in Texas no tenement houses meeting the popular idea of such insti- 
 tutions. The public's conception of a tenement house pictures a large, tall building 
 in which hundreds of persons find meager refuge under all sorts of revolting con- 
 ditions. This reveals merely the magnitude to which temenments attain in the 
 larger cities, especially in New York. It is, in fact, the pitcure of the tenement which 
 
12 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 a visitor to New York would, perhaps, carry away engraved upon his memory. 
 Yet such does not supply an exclusive illustration of the tenement system. The 
 New York tenement house law draws no such distinction in its definitions. 
 
 Under the statute of New York a tenement house is "any house or building, 
 or portion thereof, which is rented, leased, let or hired out, to be occupied, or is 
 occupied, or is intended, aranged or designed to be occupied as the home or resi- 
 dence of three families or more living independently of each other, and doing their 
 cooking upon the premises, and having a common right in the halls, stairways, 
 yard, cellar, water closets or privies, or some of them, and includes apartment 
 houses and flat houses." 
 
 New York, being the original home of the tenement house, surely should know 
 what it is. And under its definition, despite the fact that popular conception is not 
 satisfied, there are tenement houses in Texas many of them. In them, too, are 
 found conditions just as foul, just as revolting, just as inhumane, just as much of 
 an eyesore and a shame to the community, as the records report to prevail in the 
 notorious tenements of New York. 
 
 The foregoing statement is made after mature reflection. Without personal 
 inspection to corroborate it, there is substantial doubt in the mind of the writer 
 that it will be accepted absolutely at its face value. Nevertheless, there is no dis- 
 position to exaggerate the recital of conditions as they were found in some of the 
 Texas cities, and the writer is prone to believe that if the public will bear with 
 him until the entire series of articles shall have been completed, the preceding dec- 
 laration will be measiireably supported in detail. No graphic picture, however, can 
 be drawn of conditions that were seen. Nothing but personal observation will 
 convey an adequate idea of their enormity. 
 
 Between housing conditions as they are reported to prevail in New York tene- 
 ments and those surcunding the workingmen of Texas, there are but two distinct 
 differences. In New York the magnitude of evil is greater far greater. Again in 
 New York one of the conspicuous blemis.hes of the tenement system is its dark 
 rooms rooms without even a window opening to an adjoining room. New York 
 has more than 100,000 of them in which people are born, live and die. If there are 
 multiple dwellings in Texas noticeably possessing this architectural atrocity, the 
 writer's investigation failed to elicit information concerning them. 
 
 JUST AS INTENSE IN TEXAS. 
 
 But excepting these two elements in New York's housing promlem its mag- 
 nitude and tenement dark rooms Texas is pretty well equipped to match in inten 
 sity of housing evils anything that has yet been written about New York. 
 
 There is the same overcrowding of people not so great as occurs in New 
 York tenements, but great enough to impair health and to corrupt morals. 
 
 There is the same lodger evil, exerting its same disrupting influence upon the 
 home. 
 
 There is the same unsanitary house, built without bathroom, running water 
 or sewerage connections. 
 
 There is the same unsanitary closet in the yard, affording the same dangerous 
 source for the spread of contagion through the medium of the common housefly. 
 
 There is its same multiple use by numerous families. 
 
 There is the same crowding of houses upon lots too small for one, and there 
 is the same general unfitness of habitations for the purposes of the home. 
 
 The conspicuous difference is that New York is bigger and its problem is 
 bigger and consequently more aggravated. But in the intensity of the evils which 
 make up this problem it has very little that is not common to the growing cities 
 of Texas. 
 
 Men and women, who by long study and investigation have become experts in 
 this line of sociological endeavor, are agreed that bad housing consists of any con- 
 dition of housing impairing the physical, moral or m:ntal health of the tenant; any 
 condition of housing that is unsafe, unsanitary or unfit for living or home-making, 
 or any condition of housing damaging to the community or city. Conditions meet- 
 ing each of the distinct parts of this definition are found in Texas, and found in 
 shameful abundance. 
 
 The immediate victims of bad housing conditions in Texas as they arc every- 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 13 
 
 where else are the laboring people. This does not mean the destitute. The pau- 
 pers are much worse off. They live where they can find a place to sleep, in sheds, 
 in huts or in the alleys of the cities. Yet the houses of the workingmen the heads 
 of families who earn $7 a week, $10 a week, $15 a week or slightly more are fre- 
 quently by some strange misconception regarded by the public as the homes of 
 the very poor. 
 
 Investigation will prove that a city's social problem with respect to housing 
 does not so much concern the very poor as it does the industrious laborer and his 
 thrifty family. Industry and thrift can go side by side with that squalor which in- 
 fluences, outside and beyond the tenant's control, impose upon him. Many of the 
 workingmen would like to better conditions surorunding them; others would not, 
 perhaps, because they have been so long used to scant accommodations. But 
 whatever their attitude may be, it does not relieve nor excuse the conditions 
 around them. 
 
 CONDITIONS A PUBLIC MENACE. 
 
 The homes of the poorest paid of the working people of the State those to 
 whom on Labor Day the politicians are wont to ascribe the stability of the Na- 
 tion frequently reveal conditions of physical depravity that are beyond adequate 
 description. Somehow, a popular misconception has intruded to engender the idea 
 that only large cities have conditions of intense degradation. Dwellings that have 
 been described as "just old houses where poor people live," as several writers have 
 expressed it, are upon investigation found to be in their evil conditions actual 
 lazar-houses of moral and physical pestilential agencies. Homes of the wealthy, 
 which, when abandoned by their original occupants and turned over to the poor, 
 not infrequently degenerate into sources of vice and disease because they are put 
 to uses for which they were never intended those of multiple residences. Even 
 a slum the quintessential evil of improper housing and living of people is now 
 technically described as not an area but a condition a condition that can be just 
 as intense in one house as in a territory covered by a thousand. Congestion may 
 aggravate it, but congestion is not essential to it. 
 
 The only reason that Texas cities have no broad areas of congested evils 
 arising from inadequate housing facilities is that they are comparatively small. 
 It can not be denied that a very fair and productive nucleus for a wide expanse of 
 physical degradation is supplied in conditions that necessarily prevail where in a 
 certain city of Texas more than one hundred'dwellings are crowded into a lot ap- 
 proximately 300 feet long by 70 or eighty feet wide. A menacing situation has an 
 advantageous start in limitations that impose the use of six closets upon the occu- 
 pants of more than fifty two-room houses. Add to these half a dozen hydrants 
 in the yard as the only water supply of of tlie premises, the absence of drainage, 
 the practice of sleeping four to six and even more in one small room, lack of proper 
 sanitary inspection and the necessary means of protecting public health from the 
 contamination of disease-breeding influences with all these things, and more, 
 too numerous to mention here, a great public menace, it is repeated, has a pretty 
 good start. 
 
 And it has made just such a start in leading Texas cities. 
 
 it must be recalled and constantly borne in mind that no city not even 
 New York, "the horrible example" suffers a housing problem that is coexten- 
 sive with its territorial limits. There are broad areas even in the American 
 metropolis that are given over to homes that meet the essential requirements 
 of homes. New York's problem affects only parts of the city, but they happen 
 to be the biggest parts. In Texas, the Housing problems of the leading cities 
 affect vitally only their smaller parts, their more restricted areas. 
 
 EVIDENCES OF TEXAS' PROBLEM. 
 
 In those parts of Texas cities where such problems occur, they manifest 
 themselves through a number of striking physical evidences, which, as it will 
 later be seen, trace their effect upon the tenants, in a variety of moral phenom- 
 ena. In the first place, the noticeable clefect in Texas' system of housing por- 
 tions of its working people is the proximity, one to another, of the houses in 
 which it compels them to live. The dominant method of housing the unskilled 
 
16 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 workingmen in all the cities of the State is by use of individual houses in 
 contradistinction to the large multiple house which forms the popular concep- 
 tion of the tenement of New York. This, according to all experts on housing, 
 is the ideal way to take care of the lab, ring people. But the reasons why this 
 method is considered best are that when properly carried out it provides privacy 
 to the family, a yard for the children, sanitation for the household and health 
 and attractiveness to the community. Now, in the cities of Texas those reasons, 
 for the most part, have been ignored, and the exploitation of the one-house idea 
 has defeated its own end and purpose. The absence of yards, the crowding 
 together of .houses and the application of the one-house method to the exchequer 
 of the owner rather than to the benefit of the tenant, have brought about in 
 abundance the same evils which opponents of New York tenements so relent- 
 lessly berate. 
 
 This might properly be considered the gravest deficiency in Texas' manner 
 of housing its working people. A great many of the more vicious consequences 
 of bad housing are traceable directly to such a cause. The communities have 
 not been liberal in providing lots. The yard space is generally too confined. 
 While housing experts say that never more than 66 per cent of the lot should 
 be occupied by the house, very, very frequently no regard whatever has been 
 given to yard space. There are instances in nearly all the leading cities of 
 Texas of row upon row of tenant houses separated one from another only by a 
 distance ranging from three to five feet. Couple with this the wide practice of 
 building laboring men's houses behind a row that faces the street, and the acme 
 of house-crowding is attained. And this is frequently seen in Texas cities. 
 
 In respect of other things essential to a home, besides the provision of 
 ample premises, Texas cities have been equally inconsiderate. Hundreds and 
 hundreds of laboring men's houses have been built without bathrooms or bath- 
 tubs. Just as many have been erected without running water indoors. A small 
 per cent only is equipped with sewerage connections and thousands of outdoor, 
 surface closets are in use almost in the very .heart of the larger cities. 
 
 Municipal authorities have not provided rigid sanitary inspections, and have 
 not extended their sewer systems in proportion to the needs of the several com- 
 munities. Sanitary laws are not always thoroughly enforced, and in many in- 
 stances the code, itself, is deficient. 
 
 Building is not adequately supervised except in the fire Jiniits of the towns, 
 and little attention, if any at a'l,,has been paid to the kind of house, a landlord 
 shall erect and rent to a wage-earner. 
 
 In short, the cities of the State have not known of their developing hous- 
 ing problem, and concerning it there has long been a somnolent apathy. 
 
 A trip through the sections of Texas cities that are given over chiefly to 
 the residences of laboring classes will recall the words of H. L. Meader, md 
 impress one with their truth, that 
 
 "Happiness is most easily attained by being contented with one's surround- 
 ings, but to be content with some people's. surroundings would require a degree 
 of complacency that would reflect discredit on a hog." 
 
 SURVEY OF DALLAS REVEALS DEFECTS 
 
 IN SYSTEM OF HOUSING ITS PEOPLE 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 22. 
 
 Apart from social workers, who are brought into continual contact with 
 families of the workingmen of small means, there are few people, perhaps, who 
 are intimately acquainted with the housing problem of Dallas. The city h:is 
 grown very rapidly within the last decade, and has enjoyed a go'den era of pro< 
 parity, the brilliancy of which has probably blinded the people's eyes to the 
 forming of social problems. That part of the citizenship which has the influence 
 and nower to reduce and prevent conditions injurious to the public weal has had 
 no direct means of finding out their existence. In the enjoyment of its own 
 prosperity it has erroneously assumed that everybody else was prospering too. 
 Tt rarely has occasion to vi it the homes of laboring people, and. in the absence 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 17 
 
 of personal knowledge, is prone to regard as overdrawn the picture of squalor 
 and degradation whrch social workers describe. 
 
 It matters little how intense his interest, how dominant his indignation may 
 be, the picture of housing conditions in Dallas which the experienced social 
 worker portrays, is not overdrawn. It can not be overdrawn for the simple 
 reason that the cogency of words can not surpass the emphasis of facts. 
 
 Conditions of housing in cities of Texas were on several occasions discussed 
 by the writer with Dr. Charles Stelzle. the eminent social worker of New York 
 City, who has devoted his lifetime to the study and solution of social problems. 
 Dr. Stelzle was shown conditions prevalent in Dallas. A morning spent in per- 
 sonal investigation here convinced him that New York City, the ''horrible ex- 
 ample" of evil conditions of housing, "has nothing like this." And in .his final 
 word to Dallas men assembled in the Opera House at the close of the Men and 
 Religion campaign, h<e described a housing situation which he personally in- 
 spected, and characteried it as viler than any he had ever seen in any city of 
 America. Let us, therefore, at the outset obtain if possible a panoramic view 
 of -sections of Dallas where laboring people dwell, with the purpose of evolving 
 details later. 
 
 As elsewhere in Texas, the mode of housing working people in Dallas is by 
 use of the detached house in contradistinction to the multiple tenements built for 
 the accommodation of several families for whom separate apartments are pro- 
 vided. It has been impracticable to ascertain definitely the number of houses in 
 the city that are occupied by working people of small means, but from statistics 
 compiled in the office of P. K. Baker, commercial superintendent of the South- 
 western Telephone Company, a dependable estimate of the number can be made. 
 There are in Dallas or were at the time Mr. Baker's census was taken 19,412 
 families, of which 7,635 live in houses that rent for $15 a month and less. There 
 are 3.451 families living in houses in Dallas that rent for less than $10 a month. 
 But owing to a small number of vacant houses, and more especially to the prac- 
 tice of working people of small means of living in one house as separate families, 
 in order to make financial ends meet, the foregoing figures can .not be said to 
 represent accurately the number of such .houses in the city. They supply a re- 
 liable approximation, however, and it may therefore be said that there are about 
 7,000 houses in the city that are, or are intended for, the homes of working peo- 
 ple of modest means. 
 
 THE HOUSE THAT IS THE PROBLEM. 
 
 Accurately, however, it is shown by this census that 18% of the families 
 of Dallas reside in houses for which they pay a rental of less than $10 a i.i'..5iith. 
 And, parenthetically, it is recalled that Dr. Stelzle's comment upon ho'*. ..s of 
 this kind was: "Take it from me. you can't get much of a house in Daiias for 
 less than $10 a month." 
 
 Add to this 18% the 21% of families who reside in houses for which they 
 pay a rental of from $10 to $15 a month, and the importance of proper housing 
 to the entire community is shown by the numerical scope of the people it imme- 
 diately affects, nearly 40% of the population of Dallas living in houses that rent 
 for $15 a month and less the type of house that presents the housing problem 
 in Dallas. 
 
 Speaking generally, not with one, but hundred^ of examples in mind, in so 
 far as physical deficiencies are concerned, the housing problem of Dallas mani- 
 fests itself in three distinct phases, namely, the house itself, its equipment, and 
 the smallness of the lot upon which it is built. As time goes on, conditions that 
 were at first in no wise satisfactory are made worse by the wearing effects of 
 natural deterioration. About the only differences between an old house of this 
 type and a new one is that the latter is less ramshackle in appearance. 
 
 To the hou c e itself, those who have undertaken to provide accommodations 
 for the laboring people have accorded little attention. It is planned as a rule 
 to embrace from three to six rooms, the architectural principle of the "shotgun" 
 house being usually followed. This "shotgun" dwelling is the bane of housing 
 experts throughout the world. It derives its name from the single-barrel appear- 
 ance created by the succession of rooms, one behind the other, connected by 
 doors that are cut also on a direct line. Sometimes this house appears as a 
 
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 W 
 W 
 
 H- 1 
 
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 IS 
 
 H 
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20 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 "single-barrel gun." Again, two are attached by a partition wall and made to 
 form two separate apartments, each with its own front and back doors. En- 
 trance to one room is effected only by passage through another, thereby destroy- 
 ing whatever element of privacy a small house may retain. 
 
 Windows are small and afford no more light than ventilation. Draughts 
 can not be closed and in the winter months colds are widely present. The 
 houses are not ceiled and the wall coverings are the cheapest of paper which be- 
 comes the nesting place of myriads of germs as it begins to break and hang 
 down in long, dirty, unsightly folds. Roofs soon begin to leak and are but 
 infrequently properly repaired. The house itself its construction 'and appear- 
 ance has nothing in common with lofty conceptions of a home. It has none of 
 the picturesqueness of the vine-clad cottage, the log cabin nor the thatched hut 
 in the dell which the poets have endeared to us in sentimental rhyme. It is a 
 cold-blooded, hard, business proposition that embraces only those things ele- 
 mental in its renting capacity walls, windows, roofs, doors. With the forma- 
 tion of an enclosure, its construction ends. There is no evidence of effort to 
 give a .home-like appearance. No attempt is shown to please the eye nor to 
 relieve the dull monotony of sameness and plainness. The impression upper- 
 most in the mind of him who views it is that the building was erected upon the 
 theory that the cheaper the construction and the greater the rent that may be col- 
 lected for occupancy, the better, all told, is the investment. And in dollars and 
 cents this is undoubtedly true; but in social economy it is an ever continuing 
 waste. 
 
 Running water in the house is an anomaly in this realm of neg.ected tenantry, 
 and that laboring man may count himself lucky who has his own private hydrant, 
 though it be remote from the house in some inconvenient corner of the yard. As 
 a rule he has to share his water supply with his neighbor, who, to be sure, is not 
 very far away, and frequently he is merely one of four, and even five consumers, 
 who obtain their water from a common pipe. Some there are who are without 
 water facilities save a flowing well located fifty or a hundred yards away. 
 
 Kitchen sinks are another rare specimen, of sanitary devices found in work- 
 ingmen's homes, and the immediate consequence of this deficiency manifests 
 itself in the dishwater and soapsuds that surround the doorstep. Like the Irish- 
 man who declined to purchase a trunk to put his clothes in because he refused 
 to appear undressed in public, the typical laborer's house has no need of closets. 
 At least, it doesn't have them. Fireplaces are few. screens are a luxury and 
 sewerage is something virtually unheard of. Surface outhouses are the rule, and 
 one of the most deplorable defects of the whole system is the multiple service 
 they are required to perform. There are frequent instances of four families using 
 one closet and they have to keep that locked to prevent public intrusion. 
 
 BATHTUBS? FOR WHAT PURPOSE? 
 
 Then the bathtub. Society has a Pharisaical antipathy to rubbing elbows 
 on the streets with people of uncouth appearance and unclean clothes. And yet 
 society rarely thinks, as she holds herself aloof, that these people equally under- 
 stand that cleanliness is next to godliness; that they, too, realize that soap 'tn.l 
 water are sanatory agencies contributing to moral as well as to physical health, 
 and that all they ask is an opportunity to apply .to themselves the same sanitary 
 regulations and media that are the handmaidens of the elite. Society does not 
 think this, perhaps; and yet it is true. Anyone who has seen a tired mother 
 carrying bucket after bucket of water from an outside hydrant to a large- sixe 
 dishpan in the kitchen in which to bathe in turn each of her half-dozen children, 
 will not pause to ponder long upon the rational hypothesis that poor people as 
 well as the rich like to be clean. They want to be clean but they haven't the 
 chance. If one speak of bathtubs in the houses of laborers he subjects himself 
 to the supercilious ridicule of those who pretend to expert knowledge of the way-- 
 of laborers. "Bathtubs?" some one will smile, indulgently. "Why, what would 
 they do with bathtubs? Store coal in them?" And vet social workers who have 
 spent their lives among the poor emphatically assert that this implication is as 
 unfounded as it is ungenerous. Nevertheless, the idea prevails pretty widely 
 that such would be the use to which many of the laboring people would put their 
 bathtubs were they provided with them by the owners of the house-; they occupy. 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 21 
 
 Whatever may be the reason for this inadequacy of equipment, it is a defect in 
 housing common to the workingmen's districts of all Texas cities. In truth a 
 bathtub is a curiosity, if scarcity endows things with curiousness. And. this in 
 a country where the temperature is above 80 degrees during half of the year. 
 
 The proximity of the houses one to another is one of the most striking blem- 
 ishes of the system by which the laboring people are sheltered. Two houses 
 on a thirty-foot lot are by no means a rarity. Stretches of small dwellings, sep- 
 arated by no greater distance than a youth can jump house after .house of the 
 same gloomy, depressing type, having the same paucity of equipment and lack 
 of fctness f or human habitation are common enough to excite only trivial com- 
 ment. Thirty of such structures on one lot hardly large enough to accommo- 
 date comfortably one-third the number; others in smaller but no less dejected 
 groups, tucked away from view behind large, imposing buildings; single houses, 
 double houses and detached houaes in clusters of twos and threes of such unat- 
 tractive scenes there is a plenitude in Dallas, and most of them, if not all, are 
 peopled with human beings who aspire to something better, who yearn for 
 decency, but who lose their opportunity for elevating themselves in the cold, 
 merciless necessity of keeping body and soul together by the blood-sweat of 
 their brows. They want better things. They can not attain them without help. 
 
 And yet another picture. Here is a row of detached houses, fifteen or twen- 
 ty in number, facing an alley. Less than ten feet of space separates them one 
 from another. Not a modern household convenience is found in the row. Pass- 
 ing around the structures one is somewhat surprised, perhaps, to find another 
 row of the same type of construction backed u'p against the first, facing in the 
 opposite direction. Clothes lines run from one house to another forming a veri- 
 table network of wires above the yard. The drying linen from some of the well- 
 to-do homes of Dallas is exposed to the contaminating influences of a yard that 
 defies description. Little outhouses are jammed into the restricted area between 
 the dwellings, emitting nauseating ocHr, and otherwise evidencing the vilest of 
 sanitary neglect. Indescribable stenches come from vacant houses, the late oc- 
 cupants of which have not yet returned from the cotton fields. Even the negroes 
 revolt, at times, at the multiple use of unsanitary closets, and following their 
 sordid instincts, break the insecure locks of vacant dwellings and convert them 
 into reeking quagmires of fecal wastes. 
 
 Negroes? Yes. for the most part, negroes live there. But, yonder, bending 
 over a washtub amid these physical surroundings, is a white woman, emaciated 
 and worn with the pangs of poverty and the innumerable cares that fall to the 
 lot of "the other half." Her husband was a laborer whose earning power yielded 
 his family an average of $2 a day. He drank, abused her. became shiftless and 
 sought to impose upon his feeble helpmate the burden of the family's support. 
 She left him, and taking her mother and child, sought refuge in this inferno of 
 physical and moral filth. 
 
 "It's the best I can do, sir, right now," she said, wiping the soap sucls from 
 her eyes with the corner of her apron. She said it was soap suds. She was too 
 brave to cry and then the little toddler at her knees would look in round-eved 
 amazement, and wonder, in the anguish of his little mind, what the matter was. 
 
 And for this she paid $1.50 a week. The house she lived in could be dupli- 
 cated at a cost of less than $200. Including the value of the lot actually occu- 
 pied by and assigned to the house; considering insurance, taxes and ail other 
 unavoidable expenses, a generous-minded calculation of the investment and Us 
 yield would reveal a revenue pretty close to 25%. 
 
 Take another section of the town, typical of such conditions. Here is a 
 row of double "shotgun" houses on lots of thirty feet. They are occupied by the 
 families of white wage-earners whose revenue runs from $10 to $15 a week. 
 Back yards are cluttered with trash. The premises are unsightly. The hou^e 
 is ramshackle about to tumble down, one involuntarily observes. A double out- 
 house is seen in the rear, of the unsanitary type. There is a hydrant on the 
 property line. Four families use it for their water supply. The windows are 
 broken and unscreened. The roof shows to the eye its need of repair.. The 
 whole situation is repugnant to a refined sense. And for it all two families pay 
 $8 a month $4 a side. In the same neighborhood are houses of the same type 
 
m 
 
24 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 i 
 
 and construction that bring $10 $5 a family. The sum of $400 would build a 
 vastly superior structure. 
 
 These scenes are merely typical of conditions that prevail in those sections 
 of Dallas that are occupied by laboring people. They can be seen without 
 trouble by those who are interested in philanthropic work. They exist all over 
 town. And the only way to acquire a proper understanding of what the laboring 
 man is actually confronted, bound and stunted by. is to observe for one's self. 
 Personal inspection of these sections will vindicate the conservatism of these 
 lines. 
 
 PROMINENT AND IMMEDIATE NEED 
 
 OF THE CITY IS THOROUGH CLEANING 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 23.) 
 
 A survey of Dallas, especially an intimate inspection of districts largely 
 given over to the residences of working people of small means, will disclose 
 in striking detail, extensive premises that need primarily a good cleaning. Back 
 yards, and sometimes alleys, are frequently cluttered with a heterogeneous mass 
 of unsightly trash and viscous filth which would reveal, under qualitative analysis, 
 an unlimited variety of constituent poisons. The gamut of noxious agencies is 
 run in some of the back yards of Dallas, from typhoid germs conveyed from pro- 
 lific cultures of manure heaps by the typhoid fly, to vile contagion liberated by 
 the disintegration of fecal wastes of human beings, to be disseminated through- 
 out a community through a half a dozen channels of infection. How long condi- 
 tions of this kind have prevailed no one knows. Their cause is measureably 
 hard to determine, though the extent of their prevalence is sufficient to stamp 
 entire communities with the brand of unwholesome characteristics. This, how- 
 ever, is not a condition peculiar to Dallas; it is merely typical of situations that 
 are found in other cities of the State as well. 
 
 There are in Dallas five sanitary inspectors whose duty it is to inspect prem- 
 ises within the city and enforce the sanitary code. They answer all calls that are 
 made upon the health department, make regular inspections of their several ter- 
 ritories and compel where they can strict obedience to the health laws. They 
 are diligent, conscientious workers and none accuses them of incompetency. 
 When asked why, in the face of inspection, menacing conditions were found in 
 the city, the secretary of the Board of Health answered in a twinkling: 
 
 "We haven't got men enough." 
 
 The territory given to each inspector is considered too large for him to 
 cover. It has been estimated that sixty days would be required for inspectors 
 to examine minutely every house in their several districts. Premises in certain 
 sections of the city seem to get dirty very quickly. Some people have a disposi- 
 tion to be obstinate merely because they are told to perform a certain duty im- 
 posed upon them by law. The obduracy of a woman who was recently fined 
 $100 twice for declining to obey instructions of the health department thoroughly 
 illustrates this trait. When an inspector fincls premises requiring cleaning, he 
 fixes a time again -t which the change must be. made. He very frequently must 
 return several times before his orders are complied with. This consumes his 
 time and interferes with the efficiency of his work in so far as it is to be judged 
 by the results he accomplishes. 
 
 In 'connection with thi-? topic one of the inspectors of Dallas gave the writer 
 01 a rt-mari<an:e comment upon the opposition lie meets in trie pursuit 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 25 
 
 of his official duties. The small wage-earner, the negro and the foreigner give 
 the department its least trouble. "They will do what you tell them to do." he 
 said, "but you have to keep telling them. There are some you must tell every 
 time, but they obey. All I am called upon to do is to suggest that they haven't 
 $5 to throw away on a Police Court fine. It is the real estate men and the men 
 who own a great deal of rental property that give us the most trouble." 
 
 NONRESIDENT OWNERS CAUSE DELAY. 
 
 It is further learned from the department of health that about one-third 
 of its "snags," or hard cases to get results from, concern property that is owned 
 by nonresidents. Many nonresident owners of rental property have instructed 
 their agents not to pay for the driving of a nail, nor to assume any expense no 
 matter how trivial without their written orders. For this reason cold weather 
 frequently kills weeds in the yards of such property, when it chances to be 
 vacant, before the health department is enabled to get in touch with the owner 
 and receive his sanction to the assumption of the slight expense involved. 
 
 It is not always possible to hold the agent responsible for the condition of 
 the property over which he has charge. He sometimes evades action upon the 
 plea that his control of the premises extends only to the collection of rents. 
 The sanitary inspectors know of instances of agent's taking down their agency 
 signs from property when the department sought to hold them responsible for 
 the condition of the premises. "It creates a difficult situation," said the secre- 
 tary, "when we want to have certain premises cleaned up or repaired and find 
 trie owner is in Michigan." 
 
 By process of law, the health department has authority to vacate a house 
 that is deemed too unsanitary for human habitation. It can not be done by the 
 order of the inspectors, nor is the power frequently exercised. There is no in- 
 stance on record of such action by Dallas authorities because of the ramshackle 
 condition of the house, nor because of its location with respect to other houses, 
 its lack of sanitary conveniences nor the absence of other elements necessary to 
 its proper equipment as a home. It must be a public menace. Not long ago 
 the department's attention v/as attracted to a house in the city against which a 
 vacating order was contemplated as a means of protecting health. The yard 
 around the house had been filled, but the area beneath the building was allowed 
 to remain at its original level. The result of this situation was to cause a drain- 
 age of the yard to the area under the house, creating conditions unwholesome 
 and menacing to the entire community. Had the level of the house-space not 
 been raised and there was some difficulty found in enforcing the department's 
 order it was planned to exercise the department's vacating power through, of 
 course, the judicial channels. 
 
 The city carries away the trash that collects in the resident districts, but 
 there its service ends. It makes no disposal of garbage. Tin cans, boxes and 
 trash of that kind which accumulates around a house are hauled to the dumping 
 grounds without charge, the city having six trash wagons for this purpose; brt 
 the garbage, the slops of the kitchen, the refuse from the table, in fact, the very 
 things in which disease is bred when decomposition begins, is not disposed of by 
 the city. Each house owner or occupant must make a private contract for the 
 hauling away of thi^; and the drivers of the trash wagons are instructed not to 
 take even a pile of cans that contain perchance an orange skin or a handful of 
 apple peelings. "Your trash pile will stay on the sidewalk," said a sanitary in- 
 spector, "until you take all the garbage out of it." 
 
 This inspector said that it is his practice to tell the woman of the house that 
 the disposal of garbage is a matter for her solution, admonishing her, however, 
 pgainst allowing the premises to become filthy and instructing her not to throw 
 the kitchen refuse in the allev or in the street. 
 
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28 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 INADEQUATE SYSTEM OF SEWERAGE 
 
 COMPLICATES THE HOUSING PROBLEM 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 24.) 
 
 Unless facilities for thorough sanitation be provided by a community, there 
 can be no adequate system of housing. There must be running water, drainage 
 and sewerage to preclude the arising of unsanitary conditions menacing to the 
 health of the community and shameful to its ideals of civilization, which, with- 
 out these elementary preventives, are unavoidable. In regard to none of these 
 three essentials to good housing does the city of Dallas meet fully the require- 
 ments of modern standards. It is especially in the matter of sewerage that it 
 has been chiefly delinquent and least considerate of the welfare of its people. 
 
 There are very few sanitary closets connected with property devoted ex- 
 clusively to the residence of laboring people. Where this kind is found it is 
 frequently discovered that its use is the common right of more than one family. 
 The evil of such practice is self-evident, viewed either in a moral or a sanitary 
 light. And, moreover, when sanitary sewerage has been employed and the oc- 
 cupants of the house are not compelled to share its usage with others, connec- 
 Hon is seldom made indoors, and outside location invariably magnifies the la- 
 bor of keeping the premises clean.' Many of the sanitary closets of this type 
 are sanitary only in the technical terminology of plumbing. Fixtures are soon 
 disarranged by careless tenants or, perhaps, wanton vandals among the ob- 
 trusive public; sewer pipes become congested with trash of various kinds that 
 is thrown into them; the flushing apparatus loses its fittings; the door falls off 
 or is torn away, and in a very short time that which would have originally 
 passed the test of practical hygiene has deteriorated into a foul-smelling, infec- 
 tious source of annoyance and trouble. The same conditions prevail more or less 
 in other Texas cities as will appear in subsequent articles dealing with those 
 cities^. 
 
 However, the so-called sanitary sewer is largely the exception among the 
 homes of laboring people in Dallas. The poor man's sewer is the surface out- 
 house as a rule. How many of this kind there are in Dallas even the Health 
 Department doesn't know. Wherever homes of small wage-earners are found, 
 surface closets are very likely to be observed. But there is one thing which 
 the Health Department does know, and knows with statistical definiteness, a 
 card index system being employed for the record of every instance that comes 
 under its observation. It is this: There are about 500 (the secretary did not 
 count the listed cases, merely estimating them) surface closets in Dallas that 
 are maintained in flagrant violation of law. 
 
 In other words, in half a thousand instances in Dallas surface closets are 
 used when the property is within fifty feet of a sewer. 
 
 There are many parts of the city that are without sewer mains. The only 
 thing that can be done in this territory is to provide for the use of surface 
 closets or cesspools, and as between the two evils the former is considered by 
 sanitary experts the less dangerous to public health. But in those areas that 
 are equipped with sewer mains, under the law of the city, property 
 owners are compelled to abandon surface outhouses and to provide sanitary 
 closets for the use of their tenants. There are on record instances of disobedi- 
 ence to this law, as has been said, to the number of about 500. This, too, in 
 the face of the clear recitation of the ordinance and the attending penalty Tor 
 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 29 
 
 its infraction of a fine ranging from $16 to $100, each day of continued neglect 
 constituting a separate offense. 
 
 HOW THE LAW IS ENFORCED. 
 
 The Department of Health has some difficulty in securing the enforcement 
 of this ordinance against property owners. Whenever a surface closet is found 
 within fifty feet of a sewer main the owner of the property is immediately 
 notified by formal communication from the Health Department and is ordered 
 to make connection with the sewer within thirty days. When the time has 
 passed the department orders the premises inspected, and if the order has not 
 been heeded complaint is filed against the proprietor in the Corporation Court. 
 There the department's troubles 'begin, in so far as obtaining immediate results 
 is concerned. Pleas for extension of time are frequently allowed, the secre- 
 tary of the board informs the writer, and other obstacles that are common to 
 the sluggish processes of the law hinder speedy action. Then, too, the owner- 
 ship of such property by non-resident proprietors interferes in a measure with 
 the accomplishment of quick results. Outside owners instruct their local 
 agents to make no improvements without their orders, and the obtaining of 
 their permission is sometimes a matter of protracted time. However, the rea- 
 son is not especially important. The fact remains that there are approxi- 
 mately 500 continuing violations of the city ordinance with respect to* this pro- 
 vision of the health code. 
 
 Outhouses of this kind are required by law to be cleaned once every sixty 
 days or oftener, as conditions may demand. The work is done under contract 
 with the city, the property owner or the tenant paying for the service himself. 
 Sometimes conditions require weekly cleansing. There are other instances of 
 its being a matter of daily routine. Always, after cleaning, the sinks are dis- 
 infected with lime. 
 
 The physical condition of some of these surface closets is very bad indeed. 
 Tenants complain of inadequate cleaning. Others excuse the absence of 
 wooden receptacles by expressing the wish that the inspector could make the 
 "landlord provide them, and supplement their implied complaint with a recita- 
 tion of their repeated efforts to secure proper equipment. But, cleansed every 
 day and maintained constantly in a condition as sanitary and inoffensive as cir- 
 cumstances will permit, this type of closet is its own condemnation. Modern 
 housing laws do not recognize its right to exist, and they condemn it wher- 
 ever it is possible to abandon it for the satisfactory type. It is both a nuisance 
 to the community and the fertile source of contagion that is carried hither 
 r.nd thither throughout a city by the common houseflies that make it their 
 nesting and feeding place. One of the first steps toward ideal housing condi- 
 tions is its utter annihilation. 
 
 While it is forbidden by law, there are, nevertheless, a few cesspools in 
 Dallas. There are not many, but a few; and, according to statements received 
 at the Health Department, their presence is ascertained largely through the 
 medium of a neighborhood row r . When neighbors fall out, they sometimes ren- 
 der valuable information to the municipal authorities. Not very long ago 
 just a matter of a few weeks the owner of a piece of property upon which a 
 cesspool had been sunk was ordered to fill up the cavity. The job was poorly 
 done, and inspectors of the Health Department, in an almost futile effort to 
 rc-medy a bad situation, sunk deep holes in the area and filled them with power- 
 

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3i THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 ful disinfectant. It was merely a few days before owners of neighboring prop- 
 erties were threatening to sue the city for contaminating their wells. If it took 
 disinfectant liquids but a few days to permeate the entire community with their 
 flavors, what must have been the possibilities of a chemical analysis of that 
 water during its months of exposure to a neighboring cesspool? An edifying 
 contemplation, unquestionably. 
 
 Yes, these are some of the constituent elements of Dallas' housing problem. 
 
 OVERCROWDING OF OCCUPANTS IS 
 
 NOTICEABLE EVIL IN LABORERS' HOMES 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 25.) 
 
 The exterior of the laborer's home those visible barriers to his broader view 
 of life which have arisen directly from the ignorance and inattention of society 
 has, for the most part, been the topic of preceding articles on the general subject 
 of housing conditions in Dallas. An attempt has been made to reveal some of 
 the injustices that society imposes upon the unskilled workingman, as revealed 
 by the construction, location and equipment of the house in which he lives. It 
 becomes timely now to open the door to his home anad to ascertain some of the 
 injustices which the laborer imposes upon himself, not of his own volition nor 
 because of indifference to an unwholesome manner .of living, but because the 
 wage he earns is not sufficient to meet the augmenting expenses of rent, fuel, 
 sustenance and medical attention expenses that can not be reduced to a minimum 
 standard because of conditions surrounding him of which he can not gain control. 
 Ir. the last analysis, therefore, the misery within the home, which arises from 
 ''the habits of the tenants," may be traced to the same source from which emanate 
 the evils of crowded building lots, poor sanitation and ramshackle, or unsanitary 
 houses. 
 
 A workingman whose daily wage i s $1.50 finds the monthly payment of $8 or 
 $10 for the house in. which his family lives more of a burden than the natural 
 vicissitudes of his vocation will warrant his assuming. His employment rarely 
 has the advantage of stability. He has work one week and may be unemployed 
 the next. Nevertheless, employed or unemployed, his family must live and grocery 
 bills and rent, physicians' fees and medical expenses must be met. Moreover, it 
 frequently occurs that the house he may rent for $6 a month or a smaller sum is 
 so manifestly unfit for the habitation of his family that he is willing to make 
 whatever sacrifice he justly may to provide a- better. And, shortsighted, to be 
 sure, he will rent the larger house, assume the bigger obligation, in the hope that 
 perhaps things will work out satisfactorily for him and that he will be able to 
 meet successfully the increased expense of living. He makes a short trial of the 
 discouraging task and, failing, commits the inevitable error of bringing outsiders 
 into his home as lodgers and boarders. Then follow the multifarious results of 
 "the lodger evil," together with the innumerable consequences injurious to physical 
 health of the practice of overcrowding. 
 
 The detrimental effects upon the health and the degrading results to the 
 morals of men, women and children who are housed together in one room, without 
 sufficient light or air and utterly unrestricted by the common laws of modesty 
 and decency, appear, upon a moment's reflection, as self-evident conclusions. Just 
 a word, therefore, will be used to give the gist of scientific discoveries with respect 
 to this phase of sociological problems. 
 
 OVERCROWDING INCREASES DEATH RATE. 
 
 It is an incontrovertible fact, proven time and again by careful experiment, 
 that wherever overcrowding of people prevails the death rate increases. In his 
 Statistics of Glasgow, :from 1871 to 1880, Russell has shown that the mortality is 
 largely determined by the number of occupants of a room. Where the average 
 number of occupants to each room was 1.31, the general mortality was 21.7 per 
 1,000; when the average was 2.05 the mortality increased to 28.6 per 1,000. Korosi 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. ,53 
 
 cf Budapest has proven that the mortality from infectious diseases increases with 
 the increasing number of occupants of houses. Where the occupants do not exceed 
 two the mortality from infectious diseases is 20 per 1,000; 3 to 5. occupants, the 
 mortality runs to 29 per 1,000; 6 to 10 occupants, the mortality reaches 32 per 1,000; 
 and where there are more than ten occupants to each apartment the mortality is 
 advanced to 79 per 1,000. A great variety of statistics could be given in support 
 of this proposition, were it not patent that it is true. 
 
 The presence of the tuberculosis bacillus is necessary to consumption, but it 
 is very frequently harmless in fact, some say entirely so when it does not find 
 contributing causes. It can not propagate in sterile ground, but in the unhygienic 
 conditions to which many of the laboring people are subjected it finds a fertile 
 culture. And one of the most potential factors in the propagation of consumption 
 is the overcrowding of people in dwellings and the consequent foulness of the 
 air. Says an authority on this subject: "The respiration of impure air directly 
 debilitates the vital powers, enfeebles the nervous system, depresses the appetite, 
 deranges the secretions and leads to the retention of effete matters in the blood." 
 
 The moral aspect of overcrowding is more dreadful than the physical, 
 although, perhaps, its moral consequences do not so readily manifest themselves 
 to casual observation. Scientists now contend that bad air leads to intemperance. 
 It debilitates the nervous system, weakens bodily tissues and drives the victim 
 to indulgences that follow, abnormal cravings for stimulants. When the 
 threshold of the home is invaded, the privacy of the family is immediately 
 disturbed. And when living rooms are shared with outsiders the moral evil of 
 overcrowding assumes its most insidious form. Delicacy forbids further intrusion 
 into this unwholesome subject. ,The normal man and woman should comprehend 
 its vicious possibilities at a glance. The evil is here, as the ensuing examples will 
 disclose. 
 
 CROWDED HOUSES IN DALLAS. 
 
 The writer found many houses in the city containing three to five living 
 rooms that were affording lodging to seven to twelve persons. The rooms were 
 small, poorly ventilated and without sanitary conveniences. A "shotgun" house 
 of three rooms bare walls with doors and windows cut only where they could 
 not be avoided was one of the first dwellings entered on the survey of a certain 
 uortion of the citv. In the front room a blind baby was sleeping under a dirty 
 mosquito bar. Its little eyes had never opened to the sunlight. The mother 
 came into the room in answer to the visitor's call. Disorder and dirt were 
 regnant. One of the three rooms was a kitchen. In the other two lived the 
 father, mother, mother-in-law and three children. Six persons to two rooms was 
 the sleeping arrangement there. 
 
 Another house of four rooms was visited. A mother and three children were 
 the family of the house. They occupied one room which was the occasional 
 sleeping place of the father when he returned home. One room was a kitchen. 
 The remaining two rooms were given over to the use of five boarders, three in 
 one room, two in another. The woman paid $10 a month rent for the house. Her 
 boarders paid her $4 a week for meals and a place to sleep. The rooms were 
 about 10x10 in dimensions. An unsanitary outhouse and a hydrant in the yard 
 provided the premises with all its. sanitary conveniences. 
 
 In another house, containing nine hooms, three families comprising seventeen 
 people were living in eight rooms. A lone individual occupied the other room. 
 An unsanitary outhouse in the yard was made to serve the uses of eighteen 
 persons. Water was carried into the house from a hydrant in the yard. 
 
 Still another house showed twelve persons living in four rooms, most of them 
 adults, two couples of whom were married. Yet another was found to contain five 
 rooms and seventeen occupants. The kitchen was called into service at nigrht 
 and a pallet spread for a man to sleep upon. It was said to be somewhat of a 
 choice location in the winter, as the heat of the stove kept the room warm 
 throughout the greater part of the night. In the morning the bedclothes were 
 rolled up to make way for the breakfast table. 
 
 These examples could be cited indefinitely. There are dozens of them that 
 came under the writer's personal observation. Local social workers know of 
 scores of them, and there are, perhaps, even hundreds in the city. The recital 
 
34 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 will be brought to a conclusion with one more illustration of the extent to which 
 overcrowding is permitted in Dallas, the last example, however, being doubtless 
 representative of the worst conditions the city reveals. . 
 
 Mr. W. G. Leeman, probation officer, accompanied the writer to a house not 
 at all remote from the business section of the city. The first living room entered 
 was about 15 feet wide by 15 feet long. In it there were two double beds and 
 four single beds. The next room was about 12 feet wide by 15 feet long and 
 contained five single beds. Another room was of the same dimensions and 
 contained four single beds. Still another was 8 feet w,ide by 10 feet long and 
 contained two single beds. Another was 15x15 and contained four single beds. 
 Still another was 10x12 and contained two single beds and one cot. The last 
 was 15x15 and contained three double beds and three single ones. The visitors 
 were rold that "eight men slept in that room last night." 
 
 Brief computation will show that provisions for the lodging of thirty-five 
 persons are made in seven rooms of this house. A night's lodging costs I5c, 2oc 
 or 25c, according to the degrees of comfort involved in the varying expense. The 
 owner of the institution fumigates the entire premises twice a week and takes 
 extreme caution, where it can be taken, to prevent disease. And this instance, 
 though perhaps a bit more extreme in some of its details, is, after all, merely 
 typical of conditions that prevail wadely in Dallas. 
 
 WHOLESOME MEANS OF RECREATION 
 
 HELPS TO SOLVE HOUSING PROBLEM 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 26.) 
 
 The tenant, himself, is an important factor of the housing problem of Dallas, 
 and until he comes into possession of proper knowledge of living, through 
 education that may be proffered him only by his brothers of the less arduous 
 walks of life, the problem will doubtless continue to remain unsolved. The tenant 
 has been so long neglected, he has been so long dependent almost entirely upon 
 his own meager resources, that he has learned to be satisfied in a measure with 
 that which surrounds him. although an inner yearning for betterment inspires his 
 serious moods to loftier ambitions than his environment would suggest. Generally 
 speaking, he has acquired certain habits during his long period of neglect, that 
 impose serious handicaps upon frequent efforts to relieve him. 
 
 In the first place, the laborer's point of view is wrong. This is not his fault, 
 to be sure; it is the result of the ceaseless operation upon his daily life of 
 influences that are beyond his control. Society has permitted false standards to 
 arise which the more competent of society repudiate by virtue of a superior 
 intellectual view, but which, to the laborer, whose entire time is consumed by 
 the difficult task of making a living, appear as inviolable rules of life. And he 
 pays them implicit obedience. Society has yielded too much to the fallacious 
 maxim that "money makes the man," and has stooped too often to judge of 
 one's worth by the clothes he wears. The unskilled workingman regards this as 
 a rule cf society and his very ambition to follow it attests an aspiration to elevate 
 himself in the scale of living. He neglects his home to provide presentable 
 garments for himself and family. He disregards the graver ne.eds of his physical 
 being that he may appear well in public meeting the false standards of estimate 
 v.hich he thinks society judges him by. In consequence, the surplus of his 
 meager wage if there be a surplus goes not into his home, but upon his back. 
 The home is more or less of a secondary consideration with him and his family. 
 At the same time, he wants a better home. That proposition is hardly open 
 to controversy among social workers who have intimate knowledge of social 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 35 
 
 problems. The laborer's inability to assist himself to more advantage in the 
 procuring of a better home comes, therefore, not from an inherent lack of 
 ambition, but from an innate sentiment of greater potency than his aspiration 
 for a superior home, which impels him in his struggle to meet, not the right, but 
 the false standards of society. 
 
 HOME NOT A PLEASURE PLACE. 
 
 The result of this is that the laborer's home degenerates too often into merely 
 a place where eating and sleeping are provided. His social intercourse is sought 
 elsewhere. Arrayed in her best gowns, his daughter seeks her companions on 
 streets, at the dance halls or wherever occasion may bring them together. It is 
 remote from her mind to invite her friends to her home. She has no home. 
 Conditions that will be found to exist there do not comport with the appearance 
 she makes in her Sunday finery. She is ashamed of her hearthstone. She meets 
 her escort at some 'appointed place on the plea that father would object to the 
 evening's program were he to be aware of it; she leaves him at' the corner, two 
 blocks from her home, and runs alone to her door, on the same plea. Her pride, 
 which in a measure is laudable, does not, however, justify the risk she assumes. 
 And in this, if in nothing else, is shown the need of wide expansion of the social 
 center idea during the process of evolving a more substantial and satisfying 
 system of homes for the poorer working people. 
 
 The home of the laboring man is not the site of his pleasure-seeking. He 
 and his family go elsewhere for the amusement and recreation which they, in 
 common with all human beings, demand and must have for the living of normal, 
 well-regulated and profitable lives. In assisting him to find the proper kind of 
 tecreation, social and charitable institutions of Dallas are doing a beneficial 
 service, but their activities alone are not sufficient to meet present exigencies 
 without the aid of a larger part of society. As it is, they have improved the 
 condition of the workingman and his family immeasureably, and especially have 
 they made success in solving the problems of social intercourse during the 
 summer months. For an example, the public playgrounds in one part of Dallas 
 were patronized by more than 11,000 persons during one month of the late 
 summer. But with the coming of colder weather and its attendant disadvantages, 
 the majority of those people who were well entertained during the summer 
 either do without their moiety of pleasure or seek it elsewhere. The latter 
 conclusion is perhaps the more correct. 
 
 When the weather permits the carrying out of social programs such as the 
 social institutions of Dallas provide, the laborers and their families do not want 
 tor wholesome recreation and amusement. Dramatic clubs have been organized, 
 in which the patrons and participants manifest active interest. Short dramas 
 and sketches are staged at frequent intervals, and sometimes trips are made to 
 neighboring towns and plays presented to strange audiences with abundant 
 success. Picture shows are operated at stated intervals during the week, and 
 social clubs, composed of the younger set, give lawn parties, dances, hay rides, 
 lox suppers, parlor socials and such other entertainments that are capable of 
 > '.elding innocent enjoyment. The coming of winter has largely put a stop to 
 this means of amusement merely because the people have no place to meet for 
 its continuance. 
 
 Hence the great need of social center work during the development of 
 adequate housing systems. It is inclispcnsible, all social workers say, and they 
 
36 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 base their conclusions upon careful thought and wide experience. These people 
 must be amused. They must have innocent recreation. The ultimate idea is to 
 make of each laborer's home the place of his chief delight, the rendezvous of his 
 friends and the scene of his daughter's courtship. This can not be attained at 
 once. Its evolution is gradual, and during its progress innocent substitutes must 
 be provided for the streets and the unregulated dance halls. Otherwise, following 
 the natural bent of humanity who are nothing if not gregarious they will seek 
 their pleasures wherever opportunity offers enticements. 
 
 TENANT, HIMSELF, NEEDS EDUCATION 
 
 IN PROPER PRINCIPLES OF HOUSING 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 27.) 
 
 A large percentage of the laboring people of Dallas may be properly regarded 
 as a transient population. They are here today and gone tomorrow, calling nu 
 place their home, ever seeking a change of scene in their fatuous pursuit of that 
 will-o'-the-wisp which they call their fortunes. Many of them are simply lovers 
 of adventure. They love to roam for the reason that the wanderlust is strong 
 upon them. Moving becomes a habit. Others there are who move from necessity, 
 and in the final analysis it is found that this type perceive the necessity of change 
 in the utter inadequacy of the homes they are required to live in while here. 
 After everything has been said and causative agencies have been resolved into 
 their several parts, the whole situation is reduced to a housing proposition. Prone 
 to wander in the first instance, there is absolutely no way of overcoming this 
 roving spirit without centering affection and interest in a place that may be 
 called home. 
 
 Referring to a large manufacturer of Texas, Secretary Babcock of the 
 Chamber of Commerce recently wrote: 
 
 "He has told me that the greatest difficulty in the way of manufacturing 
 cotton in the South is the labor situation, and the reasons that mills have 
 developed in the eastern section of the South is because labor conditions were 
 good. He knows, and I know, that they are not good in Dallas; that he has to 
 import every one of his laboring people, and just as soon as he gets them properly 
 broken in to the work, they see the golden visions of prosperity in land in other 
 sections of Texas and away they go. I do feel that if there could be development 
 in Dallas along the lines we have started; for instance, in playgrounds at Trinity 
 Park and other things of a similar nature which would help make life attractive 
 to the laboring people * * * we could, in part, solve the labor problem." 
 
 There, in a nutshell, is the answer. Life must be made attractive to these 
 people to hold them here, to cultivate in them a commendable pride of home, to 
 develop in them the qualifications of good citizenship, and to make of them 
 contributors to, as well as sharers in, the general advancement and benefits of 
 society. Motives of self-interest and altruistic sentiment alike demand this much. 
 Their roving disposition manifests itself in their movement about the city as well 
 as in their departure from it. They move into a house which did not please them 
 at first, and which soon displeases them to the point of irritation. They are not 
 disposed to be considerate of that for which they have contempt, and, 
 consequently, they are sometimes hard tenants and prone to abuse the property 
 upon which they reside. Their homes have not been equipped with sanitary 
 conveniences, and soon they look upon such expenditures for which they, not the 
 landlord, must pay in higher rents, and, therefore, they do not demand them. 
 They want to be clean, they want to bathe, but they can not afford to pay an 
 increased rental for the privilege of a bathtub. They use the family dishpan or 
 patronize the public lyaths, where they can be had. And their patronage of the 
 public baths is a strong argument against the disingenuous comment that laboring 
 people wouldn't know what to do with bathtubs if they had them. A few figures 
 concerning their use of public baths in Dallas might be of importance in 
 connection with this discussion. 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 37 
 
 USE OF PUBLIC BATHS. 
 
 During July of this year 11,069 persons attended the playgrounds at Trinity 
 Park. Of these, 1,416 enjoyed the baths obtainable there without charge. In 
 August the attendance reached 11,469 persons. Twenty-two hundred and 
 thirty-eight of 'these bathed at the playground bathhouse. The September 
 attendance was 10,168, and of these 1,294 used the baths. The coming of colder 
 weather reduced the October attendance to 6,163 and brought the total number 
 of baths down to 728. These figures might be very much larger if public bathing 
 facilities were more adequate. And yet people need recreation and amusement 
 and baths, too, just as much in October as they do in midsummer. The 
 amusements they seek elsewhere; the baths they procure at home in the family 
 dishpan or go without. Nevertheless, the fact that the average daily number of 
 baths taken at the playgrounds has gone close to 100 in August, despite the 
 inconvenience of walking a considerable distance and carrying clean linen and 
 underwear through the streets and returning with the soiled, makes a fairly 
 forcible argument that these people want to bathe and are kept from frequent 
 use of water only by the absence of bathing facilities or their remoteness. 
 
 Again, inadequate inspection of premises for the purpose of enforcing 
 sanitary restrictions has made them careless of conditions that surround them. 
 
 Many of the houses sit high from the ground upon stilts, but for the most 
 part they are built close to the ground, with barely space enough between the 
 foundation beam and the earth for a small child to crawl through. But no 
 matter what the height from the ground, few of the houses have their nether 
 spaces inclosed, neither boarding nor latticework being used. Now, beneath the 
 house only the children and the dogs go. Consequently, that part of the premises 
 affords a good out-of-the-way place for the concealment of the trash that 
 accumulates around the house. And under the house it usually goes, being swept 
 there by the housewife in an effort to make the surroundings present a fairly 
 decent appearance. 
 
 The constant moving from house to house does not, as some would think, 
 bring about efforts on the part of landlords or the city to fumigate and disinfect 
 the premises after the departure of each family. On the contrary, the only 
 disinfecting that is done by the city concerns premises where cases of contagion., 
 diseases have prevailed. Sometimes newcomers, especially people from the 
 North, according to the secretary of the Board of Health, apply to the city for a 
 means of disinfecting their newly-acquired residences. This request is always 
 complied with, but only where the more virulent of contagious diseases have 
 prevailed does the city of its own volition take such precaution against the 
 communication of infection. Consequently, time and time again, according^ to 
 dependable information, a family will move out with the corpse of a consumptive, 
 another family will move in and no measures will be taken to prevent the 
 communication of tuberculosis to the incoming residents. Tenants, as a rule, are 
 not careful in expectoration, and consumptives, themselves, do not always take 
 proper precautions against infecting others. This is noticeably true where the 
 premises are of such nature as not to inspire respect, and the idea that is 
 frequently prevalent, that the occupants will be there but for a short while, 
 anyway, often leads to an exaggeration of the evil of spitting. 
 
 BUILDINGS OF LASTING INFECTION. 
 
 That houses may become permanently infected by the tubercle bacilli is 
 thoroughly appreciated by the medical profession and is evidenced by the 
 repetition of cases of tuberculosis in the same environment. Sputum that is 
 expectorated upon the floors or walls of a house quicklv dries and is converted 
 into dust to liberate the consumptive germs and pervade the entire room with 
 their contagion. Dust of this kind, it is authoritatively written, remains virulent 
 for months, and even years, when it is deposited in rooms _ that ^ are not 
 thoroughly renovated and disinfected when the _ presence of infection first 
 manifests itself. And when it is of long accumulation it becomes impossibly to 
 render the infection harmless by anything short of destroying the house by fire. 
 
 Infectious matter is distributed bv frequent change of residence and brings 
 about spread of the disease. As victims grow weaker from the ravages of their 
 plague, their earning power becomes more reduced and they gradually descend 
 
40 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 to the lowest scale of housing, as the worst conditions are usually found in the 
 cheapest houses. And the constant depositing of infectious matter brings about 
 eventually the infected house, concerning which Dr. Arthur R. Guerard, assistant 
 bacteriologist of New York, makes this startling statement: 
 
 "The conclusions arrived at by these competent observers tally exactly with 
 those reached by the writer, namely, that tuberculosis is not uniformly diffused 
 throughout a community, not even in those localities where the disease is most 
 prevalent, but is confined within narrow limits, as in certain streets and within 
 the walls of certain houses." 
 
 It would appear, then, that the tenant, as well as the landlord and society, 
 needs educational assistance in the process of evolving desirable conditions oi 
 housing. 
 
 GALVESTON'S CONSPICUOUS HOUSING 
 
 PROBLEM IS CROWDING OF DWELLINGS 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 28.) 
 
 Texans unite in extending to Gaiveston the compliment of their admiration. 
 No city of modern times has been subjected to tests of courage and energy more 
 heroic, nor, in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, has the success of 
 any been more triumphant. 
 
 Gaiveston, as the world knows, has risen "on stepping-stones of its dead self 
 to higher things," and gazing through the perspective of the past it perceives few 
 mistakes to deplore in its dogged battle against the stupendous odds of Fate. 
 The town has been re-made in a decade, and in its reconstruction many of the 
 disadvantages of the old Gaiveston have been submerged in the excellence of the 
 new. At the same time, it is in the relics of the old town that modern Gaiveston 
 finds its housing problem. 
 
 When the town of Gaiveston was laid out its builders planned wisely. It 
 is regularly platted into squares, except along the boundaries of the city where 
 the irregular contour of the land interferes with the regularity pi the original 
 scale. A park system has been outlined with arithmetical precision throughout 
 the incorporated area. 
 
 A system of alleys cuts the city into half blocks. Only here and there at 
 infrequent intervals has the continuity of this system been broken. The effort, 
 in the planning of the town, manifestly was to provide an amplitude of thorough- 
 fares, not alone to expedite the movement of traffic and to facilitate the exercise 
 of protective means against fire, but also to supply adequate air passages for 
 blocks of buildings which, in the nature of things, could be expected to develop in 
 the midst of a thriving seaport town. 
 
 Adhering to the original platting of the city there should never have devel- 
 oped the condition of house-crowding which upon investigation is found 'to be 
 the striking manifestation of an existing housing problem in Gaiveston. As the 
 city grew land values appreciated naturally. In the business district, property at- 
 tained the zenith of its flight and to considerable extent values became variable 
 quantities controlled by proximity to the centers of commercial activity. As the 
 business section augmented neighboring residential properties enjoyed increased 
 values, and the area set apart originally by common usage for the earlier habi- 
 tation of the island, acquired values that compelled close construction of build- 
 ings to realize reasonable and proportionate rentals. 
 
 Moreover, in the formative period of Galveston's building, the city was with- 
 out adequate streets and thoroughfares. The natural formation of the site 
 sandy and unstable made the movement of man and beast more or less diffi- 
 cult wherever paving or grading was scant. The impulse of the people, there- 
 fore, was to erect their dwellings as near to the center of business as controlling 
 circumstances would permit. Coupled with the agency of appreciating values in 
 the natural course of the city's development, this influence wrought eventually 
 a housing condition peculiar in Texas to Gaiveston alone, in that the noticeable 
 deficiency in its housing scheme the close proximity one to another of its dwell- 
 ings is a condition not disclosed by particular sections of the town, but is 
 characteristic of the entire city. In the sections occupied by laboring people. 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 41 
 
 every inch of available space, figuratively speaking, which a lot affords has been 
 utilized. The same is true of districts wherein are found the homes of the rich. 
 Leaving the business section on a tour of inspection, it matters not in what 
 direction one proceeds, his first glimpse of residences will almost invariably re- 
 veal this condition of house congestion. Looking for deficiencies in the housing- 
 system, he ( will probably seek first the sections of town occupied by the poorer 
 working people, where, experience has taught, are to be found undesirable con- 
 ditions of housing in their most aggravated form. Passing the centers of the 
 business sections he encounters here and there a group of shanties hemmed in 
 between commercial structures of some pretension to size and elegance, border 
 ing the business area. Beyond the outskirts of the business district the tenant 
 houses begin. The crowded aspect of the section is its remarkable characteristic. 
 Here is a ninety-foot lot occupied by four small houses. A rapid mental calcu- 
 lation apportions the lot into four parts, each about twenty-two feet wide. If 
 any space has been left between the buildings for air purposes or to facilitate 
 the repair of one without tearing down the other, the spectator begins to won- 
 der where the occupants found room in one of the houses for the piano from 
 which are issuing the plaintive strains of a popular love song. 
 
 CAN CONVERSE FROM PORCH TO PORCH. 
 
 The observer turns the corner and looks into the fronts of a battery of small 
 houses, glowering like the muzzles of the shotguns for which they have been 
 appropriately named. It is a warm, pleasant morning and busy housewives are 
 observed about their daily routine of cleaning up. Two, standing upon small 
 squares of wood-work which they would designate as their respective front 
 porches, are conversing across the intervening space. The elderly woman must 
 be occupying herself with a disquisition upon the merits of a brand-new broom 
 which she fondles rather affectionately as she speaks of it to her youthful neigh- 
 bor. The latter is interested and smiles appreciatingly as her friend talks. She 
 holds out her hand with a gesture, inviting closer inspection. Her neighbor 
 grasps the handle about the middle part and hands the broom to the woman on 
 the other gallery without stretching her arms to their fullest length. That's how 
 close the houses are in that neighborhood. 
 
 Farther down the street a row of negro shacks loom dull and dark from a re- 
 cess formed by two larger dwellings. Apparently, nothing but a partition wall 
 divides them one from the other. Their fronts are flush to the sidewalk. A 
 cmwd of pickaninnies are chasing each other along the street and at the scolding 
 call of some black mammy in the rear disappear down a narrow alley in response. 
 The quest ; on how to reach the back yard, if there be a back yard, is immediately 
 solved. The side entrance had not been noticed and would not have been but 
 for the course of the children. It was decidedly no place for a fat man to venture. 
 
 Block after block was traversed. Block after block was crowded with houses. 
 In the majority of instances the houses were built in groups of two, three, four, 
 five and sometimes more. In such cases the same architectural design charac- 
 terized the groups, one plan being sufficient for all. Between each two of this 
 type of house the space invariably was virtually nil. The thought was suggested 
 that perhaps identity of plan was in some way responsible for the crowding. 
 But that thought vanished with further revelations. Here was a row of large 
 houses. Each embodied a distinct architectural scheme. Some were two-story 
 structures; others were large cottages. No two of them were separated by space 
 sufficiently wide to permit the passage of a horse and rider. 
 
 LARGE HOUSES CLOSE TOGETHER. 
 
 Here was a block facing one of the car lines of the city. The houses were 
 constructed in groups of similar designs. At the corner stood two two-story 
 structures. Between them there was barely room for a fence. Adjoining were 
 two cottages, then came a group of three. Beyond was a row of three two-story 
 dwellings. Adjoining was a large house of individual planning. Beyond it were 
 three others of different architecture, large and in themselves roomy and ap- 
 parently comfortable. Now pause to calculate a moment. The block measured 
 300 feet in length. It contained fourteen houses. A little bit more than twenty- 
 
m 
 
riiiflli 
 
44 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 one feet to the house was the average ground base. Shallow yards, cut off by 
 picket fences, separated the dwellings from the sidewalk. 
 
 The increasing frequency of small flower beds indicated that the survey was 
 working back to the residential districts occupied by the more affluent of Galves- 
 ton's citizens. A corner was turned and as far as the eye could reach handsome 
 dwellings were discerned. Palm gardens there were in abundance. Oleanders 
 bloomed in the warmth of glorious Indian summer. Here was a stately mansion 
 surrounded by well-kept lawns and rose-beds. Adjoining was another handsome 
 residence. Then came the shock. 
 
 Massed together were a series of four large, pretentious houses. Of indi- 
 vidual structure and having each its attractive lawn and flower bed in front, they 
 all bore the outward aspect of homes the physical embodiment of happy life 
 within save for the manifest absence of privacy. Here in the heart of the resi- 
 dential section of the wealthy, as in the cottages of the dock-workers and the 
 poor, the same proximity of houses was found. And while the wives of neigh- 
 boring laborers could swap yarns and brooms from their galleries, the maids and 
 butlers of the rich could flirt, pass amorous notes, yea if they could avoid de- 
 tection and even press an osculatory caress upon tender lips as they leaned 
 slightly out of upstairs windows to court across the narrow chasm that divided 
 them. 
 
 On this block and on that, the same condition prevails. In some instances 
 but a few inches of space separates the structures, and an unspoken and at the 
 same time an unanswered question suggests itself: How did the carpenters nail 
 up the adjoining walls? To an untechnical mind no rational explanation occurs 
 
 This is Galveston's conspicuous housing problem. The crowding of houses 
 prevails throughout the built-up' sections of the town without regard to the social 
 fortunes of the people who occupy them. The mere condition of crowding is 
 equally apparent on Broadway and along the streets upon which the dock-work- 
 ers have erected their homes. Houses have been constructed without restric- 
 tions imposed by municipal law. The people have not thought, perhaps, of the 
 evils consequent upon congestion of their living territory, and they have erected 
 their homes neglectful of a principle of housing upon which not alone depends 
 protection against fire and other dangers, but from which comes also that greatest 
 attribute of home life, so indispensible to proper conditions of living and the 
 rearing of children privacy aloofness from the outside world once the thresh- 
 hold of the home shall have been passed. 
 
 HEAR TENEMENTS CONGEST MANY OF 
 
 GALVESTON'S RESIDENTIAL AREAS 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 29.) 
 
 The crowding of houses in Galveston has previously been shown only from 
 a front view, as it were. The great disadvantage of such conditions as they are 
 regarded from that viewpoint consists chiefly in the elimination of the element 
 of privacy in the home life of the families who abide in houses thrown so closely 
 together and in the impairment of ventilation. Of course, it is manifest that 
 where the members of one household can converse with members of another 
 across the intervening space between their homes, without the inconvenience 
 of raising their voices or putting their hands behind their ears, an impression 
 of the absence of privacy is obtained that is only less forcible than that which 
 follows the knowledge that the interior of each home is subjected to the vision 
 of the neighboring family unless shades and blinds are constantly employed to 
 shut out the view. 
 
 As between the absence of privacy and the intensifying of the gloom that 
 naturally shrouds houses which are jammed together, there can be little choice. 
 By cutting off the vision, the sunlight that faintly trickles through the crevice 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 45 
 
 between two closely constructed houses is likewise kept out. At the same time, 
 the airshaft poor at best that is formed by the narrow space intervening, is 
 deprived of opportunity to fulfill 'its feeble function when windows and shades 
 are brought into use to conceal the privacy of the home from the eyes of curious 
 neighbors. 
 
 It should, therefore, appear to the mind of the most casual observer that 
 such conditions are not conducive to good housing in the broader sense of that 
 term, and, further, that if the deficiency found in this situation were to be limited 
 to these disadvantages alone, it would be worth the while of people to consider 
 how matters cou'd be remedied and to take precautions against the ramification 
 of the careless methods to greater areas of the town. 
 
 The evils of house congestion, however, do not end with the crowding 
 together laterally of residences. Once the . plan of choking a lot horizontally 
 is adopted, either through deliberate purpose to make money, through negligence 
 of definite principles of housing, or through contemning them, congestion soon 
 ceases to be confined to the lateral extent of the houses, but creeps around to 
 the rear of the premises and makes of the back yard, x not the wide expanse 
 of ground to delight the children of the home for which it should be intended, 
 but a constricted area for the accommodation of as many small rent houses as 
 its dimensions will permit. 
 
 In reality, this is the worst example of house congestion that Galveston 
 affords. Privacy is unknown among families who occupy rear tenements. 
 Sanitation is a word that carries with it little signification. There is no room 
 to fulfill the ordinary purposes to which a back yard is put. The house that 
 fronts on the street is deprived of its natural right to a yard. The house that 
 fronts on the alley has never had reasonable expectation of having a yard and 
 is content to be crowded between the t rear steps of the big house and the stable 
 that goes with it. 
 
 BACK YARDS ARE CONGESTED. 
 
 There are innumerable instances of back yard crowding in Galveston. Time 
 and again the writer has seen a row of houses fronting a more or less fashionable 
 street that were backed up to the rear ends of a row of shanties fronting a more 
 or less disreputable alley. An effort at division of the intervening yards had 
 been made by the construction of a fence which eventually became the 
 dismembered relic of a one-time laudable purpose, or had degenerated into the 
 dead-line that separated the belligerent scions of the lowly from their instinctive 
 enemies, the Lord Fauntleroys of the Upper Ten. 
 
 Sanitation is at a premium under conditions that follow this sort of 
 arrangement of dwellings. A great many of the smaller houses of Galveston 
 are without sewerage connections. Sometimes they are remote from the sewer 
 mains and can not be connected. Other times they are near the mains, but the 
 landlord or the property owner, whosoever he may be, has either failed or refused 
 to make the connection that the law requires. The big house, fronting on the 
 street, is therefore subjected to the annoyance of outhouses in its very back 
 yard. The closets are away from public vision and often are allowed to 
 accumulate quantities of fecal waste that befoul the air of the whole premises if 
 they do not threaten the health of the immediate community. 
 
 Cut up into small areas, the back yard of a house becomes the concentrating 
 point of the trash of the rear tenement as well as that of the big house. Even 
 the distribution of dirt sometimes becomes a palliating influence. It is devoid 
 
46 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 at least of the repulsiveness of 'concentration. The more corners in a back yard 
 the more congregating points of filth there are, and the jamming together of 
 rear ends of dwellings, separated only by narrow strips of ground divided by 
 makeshift fences, provides excellent facilities for the accumulation of dirt that 
 often defies the most energetic efforts to remove. 
 
 The small premises fronting the alleys usually have as an important part 
 of their complement a cow or two, a horse, a donkey or a pack of dogs. 
 Frequently one sees a miniature back yard, struggling for a legitimate title to 
 that designation between a rear tenement and a large house facing the street, 
 occupied by cattle. It must be remembered that the lots are but 120 feet in 
 depth, and that the large house and the small one, if they be houses at all, must 
 aggregate in length at least 100 feet. The area left for yard purposes of both 
 dwellings consists, therefore, of but a bare twenty feet in depth, and when this 
 is shared by a horse or a cow or a goat on the one side and a small boy playing 
 marbles on the other, it's odds on the former to hold the fort. And that small 
 boy proposition is not of inconsiderable value. The back yard belongs to him. 
 It's his playground and he suffers correspondingly, experience proves, to his 
 lack of it. Parents are not disposed to permit their children to run the streets. 
 Out there they can not control the boy's associations. But what are they to do 
 when the back yard hardly affords room to turn around in, or is simply an 
 uninviting annex to a cow stable? , 
 
 A THOUGHT FOR THE BOY. 
 
 "That b'y is a curious youngsther," said a pleasant-faced Irish washerwoman 
 whom the writer met in Galve'ston the other day, designating a little fellow of 
 some eight summers who was trotting down the street with a tin tucket in his 
 hand. "The yar-r-rd is shmall and the drainage ain't good and the pore little divil 
 gits rheumatiz playin' 'round. But the funny thing is that the rheumatiz leaves 
 him whin he hits the sthreet. An' I can't find it in me hear-r-rt to keep, him in 
 the yar-r-r-rd. It's no place for a b'y anyway." 
 
 This industrious soul lived in a house that was backed up against a row of 
 shanties. The ordinary space of ground that should be allotted to one house 
 not only had to serve the purpose for two dwellings, but it had to accommodate 
 extensions of both houses, provide room for two closets and afford stable room 
 for a couple of flea-bitten mules. The unsightly mess in the mule lot was hardly 
 more insufferable to the eye than the mixture of dish and rainwater in the back- 
 yard of the house of the washerwoman. And she was doing her best to relieve 
 the evil condition when the writer encountered her. Her rough skirt was pinned 
 ur and with broom and pail she was making a vigorous fight against the wet 
 grounds so her little grandson could have a "place fer ter play mar-r-rbles whin 
 the sun comes out and dhries the yar-r-rd." Lack of sewerage compelled her to 
 empty her dishpans in the yard. There was no other place for the waste to go. 
 And when Jupiter Pluvius complicated her work "the little divil" had to take to 
 the street until his grandmother could get the back yard into a condition not 
 
 inimical to his health. 
 
 Investigation of this condition will prove intensely interesting. In many 
 areas in Galveston conditions in the rear of first-class dwellings are as badly 
 congested as they are in front, with the difference that the front part of ^he 
 premises is usually neat and clean whereas the rear is not as a rule above 
 reproach from a sanitary viewpoint. 
 
 A panoramic view of some blocks of the city would give the impression of a 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 47 
 
 large-size rabbit warren big houses in front, jammed together so closely that 
 passage between them is impossible, disputing, as it were, inch by inch the 
 encroachment of the little huts and cottages in the rear, but suffering the 
 constant humiliation of defeat. 
 
 There are often, it is said, more persons living in houses facing the alley 
 than there are living in the dwellings behind them, facing the street. 
 
 The houses are so closely crowded that privacy is an unknown element of 
 home life and adequate sanitation is merely a Utopian conception. 
 
 The people, thus hemmed in, can not be clean and it does not require many 
 failures to convince them of this and to render them indisposed to try. 
 
 GALVESTON'S HIGH COTTAGE FORMS 
 
 PART OF CITY'S HOUSING PROBLEM 
 
 (From Issue of Nov. 30.) 
 
 Meeting the exigencies of grade-raising has given rise in Galveston to a 
 type of architecture peculiar to that city the high cottage which is sure to 
 attract early the attention of the visitor. Extension of the plan, formulated 
 originally in necessity, then elaborated for the convenience of the household 
 with respect to more spacious accommodations, has given many parts of the 
 city a stilted appearance. The prominent architectural lines of the structural 
 city are perpendicular and noticeably elongated, depriving the appearance of 
 the whole of that physical beauty which comes from lateral expansion of 
 building schemes. 
 
 When the elevation of the- grade of the low areas of the island was 
 undertaken it became necessary to raise ih^ dwellings to permit the work of 
 filling to go on around them. The people soon ascertained .that there was 
 little difference in the cost of raising their houses two feet and five feet. The 
 chief expense of the undertaking was met when the structures were lifted from 
 their foundations. It was but a matter of defraying a small additional cost for 
 more lumber to provide large .surface cellars beneath the first floors of the 
 houses, which would give adequate room for all storage purposes in need of 
 which the occupants might be. Consequently, the houses were lifted several feet 
 above the new grade line and the nether spaces inclosed by clapboards, making 
 basement rooms co-extensive in surface with the original foundation areas. Thus 
 arose the high cottage of Galveston. 
 
 As building continued and house owners had opportunity to observe the 
 successful working of this plan of acquiring for housing purposes the maximum 
 room which a lot afforded, the idea of the high cottage obtained wider vogue and 
 became the type of dwelling selected by persons who desired to invest $500 to 
 $2.000 in homes or rental property. The result has been that Galveston is choked 
 with high cottages. Throughout the residence districts of the city one sees 
 them. They are crowded into small areas that do not provide room for yards. 
 In many instances they have been erected so close to the sidewalk line that the 
 construction of stairways of sufficient length to reach the first floor of the 
 dwelling has imposed the necessity of building the steps oblique to the front of 
 the house instead of at right angles to it as is the custom elsewhere with respect 
 if> the construction of small dwellings. The porches are small as a rule and 
 seldom afford more space than would be required for two or three chairs. A 
 small plot of ground may afford opportunity for the cultivation of a miniature 
 
48 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 flower garden in front of the house and under the steps, but it would be 
 overcrowded by the congregation of half a dozen children for a game of mumble- 
 peg or jack-stones. There is no place for romping not even for marbles played 
 in a big ring. 
 
 The rear of the tenant cottages of this type presents no fairer prospect for 
 yard space. Long flights of steps reach to the ground and clothes lines clutter 
 the air space. Sheds and outhouses occupy considerable territory, the rest of 
 which, in many instances, is kept for a long time in dampness by inadequate 
 drainage. The rear of houses fronting on the alley prevent frequently the 
 extension of the yards to proper lengths. 
 
 PURPOSES OF SUCH INCLOSURES. 
 
 The inclosed areas beneath the high cottages are used for a multiplicity of 
 purposes. Generally household goods and fuel are stored there, as they find a 
 place secure from inclement weather. Many of them have been converted into 
 washrooms where the weekly task of laundering is performed. Some of them 
 are floored, others are not. Frequently windows have been cut in the boarding, 
 giving light, ventilation and sunshine necessary to better sanitation. Not 
 infrequently, however, and perhaps in the more numerous cases, these inclosures 
 are dark and without ventilation save that which comes through the doors and 
 cracks in the woodwork. 
 
 The writer has seen these inclosures serving the purpose of stables for horses 
 and cows. 
 
 Some of them were clean stables; others were not. And in connection with 
 that discovery the question suggested itself: Does good housing contemplate a 
 stable as a foundation for a home, be it thoroughly cleaned daily and maintained 
 in a condition that, for a stable, would be termed sanitary? It would doubtless 
 occur to any one that daily cleaning of a stable would preclude deleterious 
 consequences that would naturally be expected to follow such a condition of 
 housing. But the writer saw conditions surrounding this phase of the housing 
 problem in Galveston that appeared to him not to have been relieved in several 
 days or, perhaps, a week. At his approach flies swarmed helter-skelter from 
 their quiet nesting and feeding in the filth in which they breed and thrive. 
 
 The city health department assured the writer that conditions of this kind 
 did not give it undue trouble. Where complaint is made, occupants of the 
 premises are compelled to clean up in accordance with the city's regulations. 
 Inspectors of the department are vigilant and do what they can to prevent the 
 accumulation of dirt and filth, but they are not always able to accomplish in its 
 entirety that which should be done to maintain suc.h stables in conditions 
 conforming to the well-known rules of sanitation. However, eliminating the 
 consideration of sanitation, and assuming that stables of this kind are kept free 
 of accumulated filth and fecal matter, it was frequently admitted to the writer 
 that the practice of keeping stock beneath the living rooms of families does not 
 comport with the we'.l-grounded principles of good and adequate housing. 
 
 Not all the houses that have been elevated high above the ground have had 
 their under-spaces inclosed. Open spaces are found beneath many of them, the 
 stilts upon which they rest being clearly exposed to view. The ground under 
 the floor is not infrequently clean, but of the instances noted by the writer the 
 r.jajority showed a practice on the part of the occupants to sweep the dirt of the 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 49 
 
 premises under the house. They thereby got it out of the way and out of sight. 
 But it, nevertheless, remained. 
 
 The relative value of the merits and demerits of the high cottage is largely 
 a matter of opinion. In Galveston it has its advocates as well as its opponents. 
 
 HOME OWNERSHIP COMMON AMONG 
 
 GALVESTON'S LABORING POPULATION 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 1.) 
 
 Galveston is fortunate in a comparative lack of poverty. Of the laboring 
 people, the majority find employment on the docks and receive wages that are 
 adequate not only to the needs of life, but. are sufficient to provide the nucleus 
 of a savings account that eventually develops into a sum large enough to make 
 the possession of a home possible. 
 
 Work along the docks does not maintain a constant level. It fluctuates 
 with the seasons, and at times each year the dock-worker is without employment 
 or is forced to accept much less compensation than the $4, $5 or even $8 a day 
 which he has opportunity to earn while shipping is at its height. The good 
 wives of the longshoremen and stevedores are not unmindful of this condition, 
 and in the time of plenty they prepare for the period of less affluence which 
 they know will follow. They are as a class frugal, thrifty women and take care 
 of their homes with diligent pride. They have as a rule mastered the economy 
 of the home and have assisted their husbands to put by for hard times or 
 investment definite portions of their annual incomes. The result has been, 
 according to dependable information, that the majority of Galveston's laboring 
 element is composed of home-owners. And were it not for deficiencies in 
 building plans that have already been pointed out, and others which will 
 subsequently be shown, Galveston would be largely in a class by itself with 
 respect to the working out of an ideal housing scheme. 
 
 This fact suggests the thought that there is little overcrowding of tenants 
 in the homes of the working people. And this is true. For the most part the 
 homes are occupied by the members of one family, except during the period 
 when shipping is at its height and itinerant laborers come into the port to obtain 
 temporary work along the wharves. Then home-owners begin to take in 
 boarders, and not infrequently do they crowd their families into spaces too 
 small to be occupied collectively in comfort. Houses ranging in size from three 
 to five rooms, occupied ordinarily by families of five to ten persons, are 
 sometimes made to bear the burden of additional boarders and lodgers during 
 the busy season. But this is not the rule among the working people, it is 
 learned, the year 'round. The negroes, of course, supply the exceptions. They 
 crowd into their houses without regard for sanitation, ventilation or decency. 
 But among the white laborers in Galveston "the lodger evil" has not intruded 
 itself offensively. 
 
 The city has done a great deal for its people, and that which it now lack.~ 
 in provisions for their proper care is largely contemplated in the plan of general 
 improvement to which the authorities are adhering, but which will require time 
 to work out thoroughly and successfully. 
 
I* 
 
 X 
 
52 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 LIMITATIONS OF SEWER SYSTEM. 
 
 For an example, the sewerage system is not coextensive with the area of 
 the city. This is a deficiency that is not at all peculiar to Galveston. It is 
 common to cities of Texas that have not had the obstacles to overcome that 
 have appeared at times to all but determined, courageous, unrelaxing 
 Galvestonians to be insurmountable. But as quickly as the work can be done 
 the system of sewerage will be extended so as to provide accommodations for 
 all houses within the 'limits of the city. 
 
 The Surface of parts of the city is too low to supply the necessary incline 
 for draining the sewer mains into the Gulf. Money is needed to raise the grade, 
 as it is an expensive undertaking. As soon as these portions can be filled, the 
 sewers will be extended to parts of the city that are now without them. At the 
 same time the Health Department has tentative plans concerning the installment 
 of a modern system of sewerage to operate by compressed air. At present, 
 however, this is in contemplation only. 
 
 Limitations of the sewerage system necessarily have given rise to a large 
 number of surface closets throughout the unsupplied area. Sanitary inspectors 
 endeavor to prevent accumulations of waste that would become pernicious 
 agencies in a community, but this is a task in the performance of which 
 perfection has not yet been attained. Where complaints are made they are 
 speedily attended to, but the corps of inspectors is probably not large enough 
 to bring about a constant standard of cleanliness among outhouses of this kind. 
 Altogether, the unsanitary and unhealthful were frequently seen throughout the 
 unsewered area. 
 
 More minute inspection by a larger force of inspectors would probably effec: 
 an immediately noticeable change in conditions surrounding Galveston houses 
 that have lacked a good deal of being clean. It is unquestionably a difficult 
 matter to prevent surface closets from becoming unsanitary, and the most 
 rigorous inspection must be constantly applied to keep situations from passing 
 beyond control. During the summer seven inspectors are employed, but with 
 the coming of winter that number is reduced to two. They are manifestly 
 handicapped in their work by a task too large for them to accomplish. 
 
 In the same light must the accumulations of trash in yards and around 
 residences be viewed. For the purpose of keeping the city clean, the 
 Commissioners have imposed upon its own expense account the cost of hauling 
 away and destroying the garbage. All that is required of citizens is to collect 
 the trash of their premises into piles or boxes, which are removed regularly by 
 the city's street forces. This is done without cost to the occupants of the house, 
 although they are required to pay a nominal ?um for the privilege of sewer 
 connections. During the visit of the writer to Galveston the city was at work 
 upon a modern incinerator in which the refuse of the town is to be destroyed. 
 
 UNATTRACTIVE BACK YARDS ARE SEEN. 
 
 However, there are a great many houses in Galveston whose occupants 
 evidently do not avail themselves of the city's liberality in regard to the 
 disposition of trash and garbage. Dirty back yards are not at all uncommon. 
 Trash and filth of all kinds are allowed to collect in many yards the writer 
 inspected, which, together with poor drainage and the consequent standing of 
 dishwater, soapsuds and puddles formed by late rains, made of certain premises 
 many of them, in fact veritable eyesores to the observer with a sanitary bent. 
 
 Galveston has one characteristic that few other cities in Texas, if any, can 
 boast. There are very few houses used as dwellings that are without runnincr 
 water within their walls. The hydrant in the yard is virtually unknown in 
 Galveston as the source of supply for the water of the home. 
 
 However, on the other hand, it is a city that requires adequate screenino:, 
 and this it does not have. The salt moisture with which the air is impregnated 
 rapidly rusts out most of the screens other than copper-made, and makes this 
 means of protection against flies and mosquitoes more expensive than it is in 
 inland territory. Very few indeed of the houses occupied by working people, 
 particularly the rent houses, seen by the writer, were adequately screened. 
 
 Correction of this deficiency will probably come with wider education of 
 property owners to the needs of tenants and a more comprehensive understand- 1 
 ing of what it means to a community to be properly housed. 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 53 
 
 HOUSES OF GALVESTON EVIDENCE NEED 
 
 OF MORE ENDURING COATS OF PAINT 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 2.) 
 
 More than any other conspicuous city in Texas, Galveston needs painting. 
 The first-time visitor to the seaport is struck by a dull aspect of things physical 
 which often reacts prejudicially upon him and engenders criticisms of the town 
 lhat are not borne out in truth. Colorless planks, or lumber that has lost its 
 chromatic embellishments, are not suggestive of brightness within, nor do they 
 reflect an encouraging light around them. 
 
 In their original coatings, houses', of Galveston have presented most of the 
 colors of the spectrum. The taste of the people who have had the means to 
 build more or less pretentious .houses has largely run to bright colors, such as 
 yellow and red. although the old-fashioned and ever-popular white is also a 
 favorite. Among the smaller houses, white paint predominates, or, more correctly 
 speaking, it did. The constant action of salt, moist air has not been well 
 withstood. The result has been that throughout the town, in the districts of the 
 wealthy and in those sections that are inhabited chiefly by laboring people, the 
 houses as a rule present a bedraggled appearance due to the lack of paint. 
 
 The dampness of the atmosphere, however, according to Mr. I. H. Kempner, 
 a member of the Board of City .Commissioners, is not the exclusive cause of the 
 rapid disintegration, or wearing away of painted surfaces. The cause frequently 
 is found in the paint itself, although, of course, whatever inherent defect the 
 composition may have, more readily manifests itself under the erosive effect of 
 the salt moisture in the air. The practice has long been followed in Galveston, 
 i^ is said, of calling for bids on the painting of houses, and as a rule the cheapest 
 proposition is accepted. It has apparently happened that the cheaper the contract 
 the. cheaper and less enduring the paint. Where the best paints have been used, 
 said Mr. Kempner, they have been found to last well, and consequently .have 
 precluded for a long time the coming of that half-washed appearance that many 
 houses in the city present. 
 
 On account of this appearance of dissolving paint, coupled with inferior 
 drainage which parts of the island afford, Galveston for several days after a rain 
 is shown at its worst. But the impression should not be gained that it is a 
 dirty city. On the contrary, it is comparatively clean. Its sandy soil does not 
 produce the mud nuisance and the streets and sidewalks disclose the constant 
 attention of local authorities to their upkeep. 
 
 Among all stations of society, some of the prettiest homes in Texas are found 
 in Galveston. Flower gardens and lawns surrounding the mansions of the 
 wealthy are no more complete when gauged by their grander scale than are those 
 that provide the settings for the little .homes of those people in modest 
 circumstances who understand the idea of a home and have bent their endeavors 
 toward achieving it in the abiding places of their families. The mild climate 
 almost perennial summer of the island makes possible the cultivation of 
 luxuriant plants and flowers whose blooms delight the eye and fill the air with 
 fragrance. The writer passed dozens and dozens of little homes, ranging in cost 
 from $1,000 to $3,000, that 'bore in their outward aspect of comfort and beauty 
 indisputable testimony to the inward good taste and contentment that give the 
 atmosphere and environment of the cottage some of the charm of the palace. 
 Ownership of a home carries with it not only the stimulus of pride in possession, 
 
56 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 but the greater encouragement and satisfaction that come with the sense of being- 
 settled an anchor to windward along whose unyielding cable the forces of 
 confidence and determination are electrified into definite influences upon life. 
 Where the family owns its home the principles of good housing usually govern 
 in its construction, equipment, economy and occupancy. There are bathtubs, 
 ventilation and sanitation, and there is not as a rule filth nor overcrowding. It 
 is learned upon dependable authority that there are very few houses in Galveston, 
 comparatively speaking, that are not equipped with bathtubs. 
 
 The demand for houses in Galveston which reveals the city's advancement 
 has raised rentals to a pretty high level in comparison with standards that prevail 
 with respect to workingmen's dwellings in other cities of its size. Rentals on 
 this character of house will range from $8 to $16 a month, the average, according 
 to dependable information, being some figure between $10 and $16. Houses of 
 the kind may be erected on a scale of expense ranging from $500. to $1,500, 
 convenience to town, desirability of location and other elements besides the cost 
 of construction, entering into the rental factor. But while rents are apparently 
 high, the situation adjusts itself in the general competency of th-e working people 
 as. wage-earners. It has been previously pointed out that Galveston is largely 
 barren of poor people. There are few vacant houses. The laborer is able to pay 
 the rent that is charged and does so without complaint because he is well provided 
 with means. The mean wealth of the town in comparison to that of others of 
 its size and activities would probably be found to measure to a very high standard, 
 And, of course, the general affluence of a city minimizes proportionately its 
 housing problems. 
 
 SAN ANTONIO'S HOUSING PROBLEM 
 
 CONCERNS THE POORER MEXICANS 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 3.) 
 
 In its housing problem, as in many things, San Antonio is thoroughly unique. 
 The elements of contrasts, of antithetical extremes, are rarely revealed more 
 prominently than they are shown in its manner of sheltering us people. Of 
 housing conditions found to surround the unskilled working people of the 
 conspicuous Texas cities, those of San Antonio are unquestionably at once the 
 best and the worst. They are best in the almost universal practice among the 
 more competent of the American working people of owning their own homes or 
 residing singly in families in individual rent houses. They are worst in the 
 extremity of overcrowding to which a large percentage of the Mexican popula- 
 tion is subjected. 
 
 The chief housing question of San Antonio for a long time has been: What 
 is to be done wih the Mexican population? . At times efforts have been made to 
 solve it satisfactorily, but none of them has attained ripe success, although there 
 are at present in process of evolution a number of laudable enterprises looking 
 to the solution of the problem. 
 
 It can not be said, however, that San Antonio has devoted much attention 
 t'j the housing of its Mexican inhabitants. They have been more or less regarded 
 as Nomadic tribes, coming and going at will, to whom local habitations were ot 
 no consequence other than to provide protection against occasional rain and 
 supply a temporary hearthstone for the preparation of tortillos and beans. 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. r- 
 
 The American population has worked out its own salvation. Subscribing 
 to different principles of life and imbued with a more electric energy, it built 
 its own homes, furnished its own houses and lived its own life of industry and 
 amusement. The Mexicans, perhaps, were expected to do the same. And yet 
 more than one-fifth of the entire population of the city of San Antonio consists 
 of Mexican people. 
 
 It must be understood in the beginning that not all the Mexicans of San 
 Antonio belong to what is called the laboring contingent. There are many 
 affluent citizens of Mexican blood who have cast their lots with the development 
 of the Southwest, and in the field of merchandise, in the higher trades, in 
 professional life the educated, active, intelligent Mexican competes shoulder to 
 shoulder and successfully with his American brother. 
 
 It is not these Mexicans who have suffered from neglect by San Antonio. 
 Like the Americans, they have taken care of themselves, made their own ways 
 in the world and built their own homes to the satisfaction of their tastes and 
 desires. They are important integers in San Antonio's economic and political 
 life. It is rather the lowlier element that supplies the sociological problem the 
 wage-makers whose earning power is limited by capacity or circumstance to $6, 
 $8 or $10 a week. 
 
 Of these there are many in San Antonio. It is they who lend verisimilitude 
 to the Spanish cast of the town, as they shamble along the streets in bright 
 zapares and tall sombreros, vending their wares to the curious tourist. It is 
 they who work the city's streets or walk them in search of odd jobs here and 
 there at $1.25 a day. It is they, with their constant rivals and ii.stinctive enemies, 
 the negroes, who chiefly make up San Antonio's laboring people. And it is they 
 who are housed under conditions equaling if not surpassing the congestion of 
 New York tenements, with the single conspicuous difference that in San Antonio's 
 Mexican corrals the overcrowding extends laterally and in New York it seeks 
 relief in structure upon structure perpendicularly. 
 
 These corrals are among the showplaces of the city. Not that San Antonio 
 is proud of them, for it is not, and frequently there have been started movements 
 to do away with them; but they are the scenes that the tourist of the North 
 wants to see and he seeks them out. Amazed, perhaps, at their squalor, and 
 dumfounded at the manifest contentment of the occupants under conditions 
 revolting to the eye and the nostril, he nevertheless carries away an impression 
 of their picturesqueness and a remembrance of their suggestion of old Mexico. 
 They are picturesque, but only in that they are unusual. That they suggest the 
 life of peons of the Republic to the South, and are, perhaps, an improvement 
 upon it, those who are competent to judge have no doubt. It is certain that 
 one who finds himself in the midst of them momentarily wonders if he be, after 
 all, in the United States of America. 
 
 Bent on exploration and eager to see anything interesting and new the city 
 affords, the visitor jumps into an automobile on a crisp, sunny morning when 
 San Antonio, the beautiful, is at its best, and whirling through thoroughfares 
 cleaved between long rows of buildings of metropolitan aspect and size, comes in 
 a few minutes' drive to a gateway to what he first believes to be a wagon-yard, 
 typical of Texas towns. Alighting from his car he passes through the opening 
 and finds himself within a rectangular inclosure resembling more than anything 
 else that suggests itself to his mind the interior of a western fort, showing the 
 rear view of the barracks. The building is low and long, extending fully one 
 
58 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 hundred yards from the gate. A low gallery, covered by a roof whose eaves can 
 be touched by the fingers of a tall man, girdles the building like a belt. At 
 intervals of about nine or ten feet are doors entrances to the living stalls of 
 families. Above the roof of the gallery ventilators that open outward on hinges 
 break the dark continuity of the upper wall and lend a bit of grotesque irregularity 
 to a building scheme whose conspicuous characteristic is its solemn plainness. 
 
 The visitor steps to the gallery and looks through one of the doors. Dirt and 
 disorder are in supreme control. He enters a nine or ten-foot room. To the left 
 is a bunk, heaped with soiled and ragged coverings. To the right are the patched- 
 up remnants of an antiquated bed in similar disarray. In one of the corners 
 cf the room are found the heaped-up components of a pallet. Guitars and 
 mandolins adorn the wall, with here and there a Mexican flag, a picture of Benito 
 Juarez or a crucifix. The spiders and the flies, during the intermittent pauses 
 in their aggressions one upon the other, engage in ceaseless rivalry in mural 
 decorations. 
 
 Passing through to the rear room, the eye of the visitor notes at a glance 
 the sloping of the roof downward to meet the lower back wall of the house. 
 Shingles only protect the room space from the weather. A small cook stove, in 
 a bad state of repair, is filling the room with the pungent aroma of burning 
 mesquite limbs, as upon it boils merrily a can of frijoles, or Mexican beans. A 
 table, from the surface of which one may scrape with his finger nail, or preferably 
 the ferrule of his cane, parrafin-like cakes of grease and grime; a chair or two, 
 a wood box, a worn-out broom and kitchen utensils of various kinds complete 
 the scene. It's a cold morning. Behind the stove a hairless dog is dozing. He 
 only opens his eyes half-way to note the intrusion, then goes back to sleep. He, 
 too, is Mexican. 
 
 Returning to the front room the visitor perceives a ladder. Above it is a 
 square opening cut in the ceiling if ceiling it be of the sleepng room. Pursuing 
 his way up the ladder he finds himself in a loft, covered with bedding. He then 
 appreciates the function of the ventilators, the odd appearance of which struck 
 his eye when he entered the premises. He hurries back, after a rapid survey of 
 the room, to the aperture through which he descends to the fresher air below, 
 grateful for the opportunity to catch his breath again. 
 
 Stall after stall is visited. There are more than fifty of them. All were 
 found in virtually the same condition of uncleanliness. All gave evidence of 
 occupancy by more persons than they could comfortably accommodate. All 
 rented for goc a week, except those in which the landlord provided the stove. 
 And they? One dollar and a quarter a week! 
 
 Some of them are always occupied. All are sometimes occupied. Frequently 
 several hundred persons are found living in the entire corral. The landlord had 
 never counted them. He didn't know how many tenants he had. His dealings 
 were with one member of a family or with an individual who wanted lodging. 
 Sometimes there were a hundred. Sometimes there were more. Cotton-picking 
 time always reduces his population. And it was cotton-picking time then. At 
 least all the laborers of the field had not returned to the city from the country. 
 Soon as frost comes business will pick up. The landlord was kept busy counting 
 bis money. No time to count the people. A good investment? Why, it's the 
 best in the world. This thing gets $250 a month! But it's hard money. It has 
 to be watched like a hawk. It's hard to make them pay. When white people 
 come in they cause trouble. They know the law. Sometimes they stay in bed 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 59 
 
 and refuse to pay the rent. But the Mexicans can be bluffed. That's the only 
 way to handle 'em. Bluff 'em! This fist got hurt the other day in putting a bluff 
 across. But it worked. The rent was paid. 
 
 And there you are. 
 
 The public is doubtless interested in the sanitary equipment supplied by 
 these quarters. More than half a hundred families can find sleeping places 
 such as they are in the corral. There were less than one dozen closets for the 
 use of the entire community. They were built side-by-side in groups of two, and 
 were of the ordinary flushing type, built after a crude and sturdy pattern to 
 withstand the wear and tear of careless treatment. None of the sinks was found 
 to be clean. Half a dozen hydrants in the yard supplied the water for all purposes. 
 
 Children shared the yard with horses and burros. The lauer as well as the 
 former roamed at will over the premises, seeking a wisp of hay or a grain of corn 
 that had escaped previous gleanings. The smaller children rolled and tumbled 
 in the soft dirt which the slothful hoofs of the donkeys had pulverized by constant 
 treading. 
 
 Carrying a graphic mental picture of big problems in the concrete, the 
 stranger walks out of the corral, mingles with the busy commercial traffic of the 
 street for a moment, re-enters his automobile and is whisked away to the 
 Franciscan missions, older by hundreds of years, but not as dilapidated nor "run 
 down at the heel" as the habitations he has just left. 
 
 SAN ANTONIO CORRALS ARE CALLED, 
 
 BY SOME, GILT-EDGED INVESTMENTS 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 4.) 
 
 There are about twenty corrals in San Antonio, given over chiefly to the 
 shelter of Mexicans. All do not present the same vicious features, but there is 
 no dissimilarity in the evil that comes from their use as multiple houses. While 
 most of them have been built of wood and are more or less flimsy affairs at 
 best, there are notable instances where brick and even concrete have been used 
 in thir construction. 
 
 The ir.ore substantial structures are. of course, the best the city provides. 
 They have as a rule a larger supply of household and sanitary conveniences 
 than the inferior structures are equipped with and, renting for more money, have 
 drawn to them a more industrious and a more competent class of tenants. 
 They are for the most part, however, hidden from the street, and provide the 
 habitat of little colonies of people too numerous to be housed comfortably or 
 even decently in the limited space allowed. 
 
 There are large corrals and small ones, ranging in capacity from a dozen 
 or two compartments or stalls to more than one hundred. Some of them con- 
 sist of large houses strung out for many feet in unbroken continuity with but 
 thin board partitions between them. The others are composed of small rooms, 
 affording but a moiety of light and ventilation and not much space for the 
 turning around of many people. 
 
 As the landlord views them, these corrals are "gilt-edged" investments. 
 They are kept up at trivial expense. The Mexican and the poorer white people 
 whom necessity sometimes drives to refuge in them, are not sticklers for looks. 
 Nor do they mind sharing with the rest of the community tne meager water 
 and sanitary facilities which the premises afford. They are held under tight 
 curb by the landlord, who watches his property w r ith tireless eyes, and are pre- 
 vented by his diligent surveillance from injuring the property more than natural 
 laws of deterioration under constant usage would excuse. The property is not 
 often left exclusively to the tenants' care. There are too many to reckon with. 
 
 One's first thought would be that conditions under which these people 
 
60 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 live would be productive of frequent fires. But this is not the case. One land- 
 lord told the writer that in his long experience as the proprietor of a corral 
 but one fire had occurred and that was due to the carelessness or feebleness of 
 a sick man who was occupying one of his rooms. It is probable that the con- 
 stant presence of some one on each of the individual premises is the real pre- 
 ventive of fire, but after viewing the scene a search for a reason will some- 
 times suggest Jacob Riis' story of the New York tenement house that was too 
 well saturated with dirt and filth to offer a combustible body to the flames. 
 
 WHAT THE CORRALS EARN. 
 
 In dollars and cents, and considered solely from the viewpoint of the 
 owner, these institutions are undoubtedly gilt-edged investments. They are 
 money-makers for the owners. But for the city and for society they are about 
 the most uneconomical mean-s of housing that could be provided. They breed 
 an undesirable element of society, they increase the police expense of the city, 
 they make the community more susceptible to the inroads of disease, and as a 
 moral influence injurious to the general welfare, their potentiality can not be 
 estimated. These are conclusions that are inevitable after brief study of the 
 situation. Expensive in the long run and detrimental to the city from every 
 viewpoint, the profitable thing to do would be to abandon them for a more 
 decent,' a more humane, a more righteous method of housing the poorer Mexi- 
 cans. Until this end shall have been attained, San Antonio will continue to be 
 menaced by the evil influence of the corral, for these people must be housed 
 and they drift to those places that are provided for them, and rarely, as a class, 
 concern themselves about making their own lot in life, or creating their own 
 homes. 
 
 SAN ANTONIO JACALS ARE CURIOUS 
 
 ELEMENTS IN CITY'S HOUSING PROBLEM 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 5.) 
 
 The corral is not the sole evidence of San Antonio's housing problem. Its 
 accompaniment, the jacal, an Americanized adaptation of the thatched hut of 
 Mexico, has tenaciously held its own in certain quarters of the town, despite the 
 aggression of the sky-scraper and the modern dwelling upon its original site. 
 
 The jacal is more or less of a puzzle. Topsy, it will be remembered, "just 
 growed." The jacal evidently "just happened." Manifestly without excuse in a 
 metropolitan community, it is hardly without reason or purpose, for the shelter 
 it provides for human beings is little better than nothing, and the home it makes 
 is no home at all. 
 
 Its color, in the original, is as variegated as Joseph's coat. The various tints 
 of different canning factories lend an irridescent glitter to the walls as long as 
 the labels last, but with the coming of the rain the mucilage dissolves,' the paper 
 falls off and leaves a shack of shining silver. Oxidizing under the reaction of the 
 air and moisture, the hut soon assumes a mottled aspect, changing eventually 
 to a deep brown, which in richness of color but, alas, in that alone supplies 
 something in common with the neat, pretty little homes that sometimes sur- 
 round it. 
 
 In superficial appearance it resembles some huge lamellicorn beetle that 
 might have crawled out of the tombs of the Pharaohs after a protracted sleep 
 that made Van Winkle's slumber nothing more than a summer dream. If archi- 
 tecture named its styles from bugs or animals, the jacals would surely be con- 
 signed to the scarabaeus class. In fact, down in San Antonio they call them 
 "cockroaches." But for purposes of descriptive nomenclature there is little 
 need of changing from the scarab to the blatta oHentalis. A beetle or a cock- 
 roach conveys the same idea of appearance. 
 
 They are built right on the ground and are constructed of all manner of 
 castaway materials, in which, however, the flattened-out tins of gasoline, coal 
 oil and tomato cans predominate. They are rarely high, and should a tall man 
 enter an average adobe of this kind he would in all probability be compelled 
 to stoop to avoid scraping his hat against the cobwebs on the nether side of the 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 61 
 
 roof. Posts, procured either from some near by dumping ground or cut from 
 the mesquite thickets around the town, supply the props for the structure. 
 Where cracker boxes have been found in abundance they have been broken up 
 into boarding for wall coverings. Where planks of no kind or sort have been 
 available, the city's trash piles have been gleaned for cans, the tins are stretched 
 around the fragile framework and put on like the foliated scales or wings of 
 the cockroach, hence the name. 
 
 Sometimes, when the builder possesses more than ordinary knowledge of 
 construction, he runs his roof to an apex, either in the form of a parallelogram 
 or a cone, to provide better security against the rain. If he intends that his 
 stove shall be indoors, he searches for abandoned pieces of stovepipe until he 
 finds them, or, failing in that, he constructs a chimney from topless, bottom- 
 less tomato cans, eld buckets or any available material that supplies the neces- 
 sary cylindrical shape. There is one of tnese cockroach houses that is always 
 pointed out to the visitor as a greater curiosity than the rest because of the small 
 chimney of worn-out washtubs that have been neatly articulated into something 
 of an ornamental design as well as to fulfill a utilitarian function. 
 
 MANY OF THEM ARE FOUND. 
 
 These houses are found single, in groups and in strings at various places in 
 the Mexican settlements of San Antonio. Sometimes they consist of one room, 
 sometimes of more. Occasionally one is noted that is of superior accommo- 
 dations. Considerable time and some money, perhaps, were expended upon its 
 construction. All told, according to dependable information, there are about 
 two hundred of such shacks in the city, perhaps a few more. They are built 
 upon ground that is rented for a small fee, "or upon which the occupants have 
 squatted to reside as long as they may before being ejected. In some instances 
 occupants have bought their own lots on the basis of $i or $2 down and the 
 same amount each week until the cost price is paid, and instead of building real 
 houses have put up huts to shelter them until better times come. Most of them 
 are without water, the domestic supply being obtained from "water merchants" 
 of their own race who make their daily rounds of the community, driving a 
 sleepy burro hitched to a barrel on wheels. These merchants purchase their 
 water from the owner of an artesian well and sell it at a pretty large profit 
 gross. Of closets there are few, all being of the surface kind. 
 
 The premises surrounding these jacals are, as a rule, clean and well kept. 
 It is inside that dirt and disorder reign particularly. As to cleanliness they are 
 shown to better advantage than those of the corrals which pretend to greater 
 excellence as homes. The Mexican's delight in flowers and vines is cherished 
 here, while in the corrals it is neglected. Frequently one' sees specimens of these 
 little shacks almost completely covered with trailing plants, and embowered in 
 china-berry trees planted by the builders or the early occupants. Flower beds 
 arid rose bushes often surround them, lending a piquancy to the scene that, while 
 apparently foreign to the entire scheme of things, gives the whole a picturesque- 
 ness that is genuine and unaffected. Nature has done much for the resident of 
 San Antonio, as every one knows who has ever dwelt or visited there, and above 
 corrals and jacals alike stately trees outstretch their umbrageous arms in bene- 
 dictions upon the heads of the lowly who reside in penury and in ignorance be- 
 neath them. Little streams ripple by in which naked and ragged children play 
 in the high glee of innocence, while the quail call from the thickets and the 
 mockingbirds send forth their constant carols of ecstatic melody. All, too, 
 within the city limits of San Antonio, for the builders of the town planned gen- 
 erously and incorporated thirty-six square miles within the municipal domain. 
 
 And nowhere in the Mexican settlement is there evidence of race suicide. 
 There are children everywhere. Some wear clothes, some don't. Those who 
 are accustomed to the habiliments of civilization are in nowise disposed to lord 
 it over their less learned brothers and sisters. They are one big family and the 
 naked are as welcome at play as the clothed. Of course, the coming of colder 
 weather makes garments necessary for bodily warmth, but the doubtful modesty 
 of the Mexican does not suggest clothes for the little tots as a means of con 
 cealment of person. They are reserved for a mpre practical and imperative 
 purpose. 
 

64 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 SOCIETY'S INTEREST IN HOUSING 
 
 SHOWN BY VOCATIONS OF THE POOR 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 6.) 
 
 The effect upon San Antonio and. in a measure, upon Texas, of bad housing 
 in the Mexican settlements of that city is readily perceived through a study of 
 habits that are necessarily formed under adverse conditions of living, and is 
 emphasized by a little knowledge of these occupations of the people who are 
 involuntarily subjected to them. 
 
 Human beings can with difficulty be clean and sanitary in their everyday 
 life in a San Antonio corral. A half a dozen hydrants, located in the yard, are 
 certainly not conducive to cleanliness among fifty or more families who have no 
 other source of water supply. It is a long way to the water usually, and the 
 trips with a bucket or two necessary to fill a bathtub are fatiguing and, from 
 the .viewpoint of many people, perhaps, are hardly worth the while. Besides, 
 there are no bathtubs. Whatever bathing is done is customarily self-administered 
 or performed by mother for child in a dishpan or some other commodious vessel 
 the kitchen equipment may afford. 
 
 The city's system of collecting and disposing of garbage is theoretically 
 unobjectionable, but in practical application it is faulty. The trash and garbage 
 boxes with w r hich corrals are provided are not cleaned with frequency sufficient 
 tc keep in a condition of minimum offensiveness the odious and unsightly 
 accumulation of refuse which these multiple houses throw out. Kitchen drainage, 
 there is none, except through the open door or window to the yard. 
 
 The use of one closet by ten families or more is hardly a decent nor a sanitary 
 custom. Yet it is, irremediable under prevailing conditions in many places. Its 
 most successful collateral function, doubtless, is the dissemination of disease. 
 
 Herded together like cattle, these people necessarily are the prey of contagion 
 once it inserts its tentacles into the fabric of their community life. What one 
 contracts, the others catch from him. Living, too many in a room, enhances the 
 opportunity of infection or pestilence, and intensifies the dirt. There is no relief 
 but separation. But there is little need to exploit these things. They are self- 
 evident truths. 
 
 Passing through a typical corral of San Antonio a visitor in the fall of the 
 year will note here and there little piles of nutshells, and, perhaps, he will see a 
 group of unkempt Mexicans huddled over a sack of nuts at frequent intervals 
 along the way, deftly picking the rich, juicy kernels from the hulls. Repetition 
 ct this sight will usually provoke inquiry, upon which it is learned that a large 
 number of the occupants of the corral and of the other institutions of the kind in 
 the city, make their livings at that time of the year by shelling pecans for the 
 market. The nuts are sold to them upon a stated basis, usually controlled by 
 the market price, and they are bought back, after shelling, at a slight advance 
 which provides the shellers' wages. 
 
 Engaged in this occupation, the Mexicans do not relieve themselves of the 
 sordid conditions that normally surround them. They can't. They are bound 
 to them, and when pecan shelling time comes they bring the nuts to their homes 
 in the corrals, and sitting down amid the usual squalor of the place, proceed 
 stolidly with their occupation. Sometimes the shelled nuts remain in little piles 
 on the floors until ready to be resold. Sometimes there are receptacles for them. 
 At all times it is a safe venture that the Mexican's house is just as dirty as it was 
 the week before, and that the Mexican, himself, has made no more frequent trips 
 to the hydrant in the yard to wash his hands than occasion required in the pist. 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 6s 
 
 HAVE BECOME POPULAR DELICACY. 
 
 Shelled pecans are becoming a popular delicacy. Most of the bars in San 
 Antonio are equipped with catch-penny machines from which drop a handful of 
 salted nuts when a nickel is inserted in the slot. Candies of all sorts contain the 
 kernels, of pecans as their chief ingredients. Cakes and puddings are made from 
 them. They are used in San Antonio. They are sent throughout the State, and 
 even, it is said, large manufacturing concerns of other States are in the market 
 to buy them for a variety of uses. 
 
 And most of them come . Well, it would not be accurate to say that 
 
 most of them come from the hands of residents of San Antonio's corrals because 
 the statement could not be positive in the absence of unimpeachable information. 
 But suffice it to say that a great many of them do come from those very places 
 places which if once visited may have the effect of changing one's taste for a 
 very succulent confection, if he be normally impressionable. 
 
 Then, there is the candy-maker. The silent vendor of San Antonio's Mexican 
 dulce a delicacy that is pleasing to anyone with a sweet-tooth usually hails 
 from a corral. If not that, then from a jacal. 
 
 And the tamale merchant, too. 
 
 Just pause to think that the tamales one may purchase on the street came 
 from that very same pot in yonder corral which boiled sullenly amid the foul air 
 and the filth of the room that was forced to serve more than a culinary purpose 
 in taking care of an overcrowded family. You saw a grimy senora 'rolling out 
 tortillos upon a heavy stone base which she had placed in front of her on the 
 gallery of one corral. You also looked into her living room and the kitchen that 
 went with it and viewed in silent wonder the dirty appearance and general 
 disorder that reigned in the two little rooms. Perhaps this shambling vendor is 
 the lord and master of that humble abode and these the wares his spouse 
 prepared for sale. 
 
 However, the risk one takes in matters of this kind is not peculiar to San 
 Antonio. It's just as great in other places where Mexicans are housed together 
 like sheep. In one of the smallest and dirtiest places in Dallas visited by the 
 writer he discovered a white woman spreading cornmeal on corn-shucks while a 
 Mexican man with deft but dirty fingers "chucked" in the meat "filling" and 
 rolled the whole thing up like a cigarette to put away in the pot to boil. Should 
 the whole scene, premises, workers and all, come to one in a dream he would 
 surely wake up the next morning with the recollection of a nightmare. 
 
 In this does the public suffer immediately from neglect of the Mexican 
 population that is found everywhere in Texas. Without assistance from the 
 people in the getting of homes, these timid, helpless foreigners must shift* for 
 themselves and make the most of a bad situation. They are usually of the class 
 that is on friendly terms with dirt, and when they find themselves witnoot 
 facilities for being clean, and are compelled by necessity to live in hovels unfit 
 for human habitation, they degenerate into a condition of uncleanliness that 
 seems to make them happier as it intensifies. In the meantime, the public which 
 knows nothing about their places of abode and labor, and apparently cares less, 
 continues to buy their goods and consume them with all the attendant risks cf 
 contact and consumption. 
 
68 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 LAUDABLE PROJECTS UNDER WAY TO 
 
 GIVE MEXICANS BETTER HOUSING 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 7.) 
 
 It was written in the beginning of this series of articles that housing 
 conditions surrounding the working people of San Antonio were at once the best 
 and the worst disclosed by an investigation of the conspicuous cities of Texas. 
 Evil conditions that prevail there have been shown and now, turning the survey 
 into more encouraging scenes, an effort will be made to reveal a picture of 
 conditions of housing that conform largely to a more exacting program of 
 scientific and sanitary construction, location and equipment of dwellings for the 
 use of the laboring people. 
 
 A brief visit to the newer additions of the city that are given over largely 
 to the residence of Mexicans soon suggests the conclusion that the occupants of 
 the corrals and jacals are of the lower peon class of Mexicans and want nothing 
 better, or they are temporarily situated financially under adverse circumstances 
 that prevent them from bettering their condition of living, or, finally, they are 
 unable to procure homes amid superior environments because of. an insufficient 
 supply. One of. or all these reasons, may enter the explanation of corral or jacal 
 life. Suffice it to say that whatever inherent similarity may prevail between the 
 occupant of the corral and the resident of the individual Mexican home, that 
 common attribute or characteristic is lost in the transition from the stall to the 
 cottage, in so far as its manifestation in outward appearances and apparent 
 inward contentment is concerned. The family in the cottage obviously .has a 
 purpose in life and reveals it; the family in the corral shows plainly that it 
 merely exists. 
 
 Several years ago. enterprising business men, who possessed at the same 
 time a philanthropic impulse, conceived the idea of giving the Mexican population 
 of San Antonio something it had long stood in need of assistance from the 
 public and a fighting chance. They took in the situation at a glance in all its 
 uninviting details. Spread out before them was a scene upon which moved 
 thousands of working Mexicans whose homes were hovels, crowded into space 
 too small to accommodate them comfortably or decently. In Mexico they live 
 that way, to be sure, but these business men felt that they should find conditions 
 more beneficial and satisfying in the United States. The thing to be done was to 
 rid the city of corrals and huts by providing individual homes for their residents 
 upon a basis of purchase or rental not out of reach of the small wage-earner. Of 
 course, the primary purpose behind this project was that of revenue, but at the 
 same time the intention was to make the profits of the enterprise represent a just 
 reward for philanthropic labor. Two promoters of an enterprise of this kind 
 both young men. graduates of the University of Texas, by the way told the 
 writer that they were materially assisted in launching their undertaking by 
 philanthropic people of means who appreciated the work for its humanitarian 
 value rather than because of its opportunity as a business venture. 
 
 Therefore, out of this movement having for its purpose first, the making of 
 money, secondly the performance of a philanthropic work, there grew a large 
 and profitable business, soliciting chiefly the patronage of Mexicans. Land was 
 purchased within the city limits not too far away from the business districts to 
 allow the transportation problem to intrude itself as a serious obstacle. This 
 property was cut up into lots ranging in dimensions from thirty-five to forty 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 69 
 
 feet wide by seventy-five to one hundred feet long. Anyone desiring a home of 
 his own can have one in this territory for the payment of & small sum, a dollar 
 or two dollars, down, and the same amount weekly thereafter until the entire 
 debt shall have been liquidated. A house will be built for him. It is a small 
 house, to be sure, the size and cost of construction varying little from a common 
 standard. But he wants a small house. It is the only house he can afford. And 
 he takes possession immediately upon its construction or the payment of the 
 first installment, happy and content in the consciousness that he has a home, 
 .and ambitious, generally, to make of it the very best that he can. 
 
 WHAT THE HOUSES COST. 
 
 Houses of this kind are built in San Antonio at a cost ranging from $180 to 
 $300, the entire investment for lot and house rarely exceeding $400 to $500, the 
 idea being to require weekly payments that will liquidate each obligation in not 
 more than five years. The system necessitates thousands of accounts, but they 
 are not too much trouble to keep. Then, they are profitable. 
 
 Various types of houses are constructed. There are three-room, four-roDm 
 and five-room cottages. Some of them are the old-style shotgun houses, with 
 rooms opening one into the other in a direct line. Others are more satisfactory 
 in architecture, being built with something more in mind than simply the idea 
 of providing shelter from the rain and protection from the sun. Most of them 
 are equipped with running water, but as yet sewerage connections have not been 
 made owing to the limitations of the city's system. Outside closets, therefore, 
 are necessary. 
 
 The other prominent deficiency in this house is its lack of bathtubs. Few 
 are constructed with bathroom facilities. They will, perhaps, come in time. 
 
 However, despite these structural defects the individual house is proving the 
 solution of the Mexican housing question in that it affords the family freedom 
 and privacy. The family has its own premises to do with what it pleases. It is 
 not crowded and need not suffer the moral and physical injuries attending the 
 congestion of houses or people within them. 
 
 While they are not large, the lots are ample to the needs of the home and 
 provide space for flower beds and vegetable gardens and opportunity for the 
 children to romp and play without undue restraint. 
 
 Owners of some of these houses have made them little bowers of beauty. 
 A morning's ride through any of these additions will disclose here and there a 
 $200 cottage wearing at first glance the appearance of a $1,000 house merely 
 because its setting of lawn and flowers shows it off to superior advantage. Some 
 of the houses are almost covered with vines and trailing roses. Others are 
 fragrant in envelopes of honeysuckle. Great red dahlias or kindred blooms lend 
 brilliance to the color scheme, and even the tiny violet finds affectionate care 
 from some member of the household. For its size, and considering its cost, one 
 of the prettiest yards in San Antonio surrounds a $200 shotgun house. In short, 
 the evolution of this plan has made homes where homes did not exist and for 
 people who, many thought, had no idea of a home other than in its conception of 
 a place to sleep and eat. 
 
 MANY RESIDENTS OWN THEIR HOMES. 
 
 Housing evils have not noticeably intruded themselves into the homes of the 
 American working people of the city. There are a great many individually owned 
 homes which, for the most part, are kept in admirable condition. Natural 
 
70 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 advantages contribute much to the ease of beautification in San Antonio, and 
 these have been made use of universally by home-owners, both rich and poor 
 alike. The lots upon, which houses are built range from forty to fifty feet and 
 sometimes more in width and are as a rule about twice as long as they are wide. 
 The city's sewer system is not adequate to the needs of the people, but where 
 mains are accessible connection is compulsory under municipal ordinance. There 
 is very little evidence, indeed, of house congestion, and so far as the writer's 
 information goes there is but a paucity of overcrowding of people among the 
 homes of the American working people. 
 
 Many of the negroes of San Anton ; o are housed in the ordinary shotgun 
 cottage, and there is more or less overcrowding indoors, but as a rule the houses 
 are pretty well separated one from the other. They are erected upon lots of the 
 usual dimensions. There are here and there, and quite frequently, too, shanties 
 and hovels in the last stages of delapidation, but they can not be said to be the 
 rule. The negro is universally an occupant who is hard on his house in his use 
 of it. He. is not inherently cleanly and is disposed to enjoy himself under 
 conditions of filth that are revolting to the average white person. The negro 
 quarters of San Antonio, among the lower classes, evidence this trait of character. 
 The yards are littered with trash. Where there are no sewer connections, even 
 for kitchen drainage, the back yard or the front, it doesn't matter much which it 
 is, frequently gets the dishwater. There are in San Antonio, however, many 
 well-to-do negroes who own their own homes and maintain their premises in a 
 pleasing condition of orderliness and sanitation. 
 
 All in all, it might be well to say that if the city of San Antonio would extend 
 its sewer mains, do away with the outside closet, devote more attention to its 
 streets, bring to bear greater pressure upon its force of sanitary inspectors, it 
 would then find its housing problem confined to the Mexicana population almost 
 exclusively. The corral may go eventually under the aggression made upon it 
 by business projects now looking to the better housing of the Mexicans, but it 
 seems to have a pretty tight hold on the situation. It, too, would more speedily 
 disappear were it to receive municipal attention. The huts and hovels must 
 ultimately make room for houses, and as the transition takes place they will 
 probably be pushed farther and farther out until they are beyond the limits of 
 the city. 
 
 DARK ROOMS OF HOUSTON FORM SMALL 
 BUT IMPORTANT PART OF ITS PROBLEM 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 8.) 
 
 It was in Houston that the writer saw for the first time during his recent 
 investigations that architectural iniquity known as the dark room. It presents 
 a phase of the general housing problem that is not widely manifest in Texas, 
 but its simple presence, restricted though it be to remote and infrequent 
 instances, is by housing experts regarded as the sinister foreshadowing of 
 menacing evils that must be eradicated at once to preserve future conditions 
 against irreparable injury. 
 
 Once the dark room .takes firm hold, its elimination becomes a matter of 
 vast expense and indefatigable effort. New York's experience proves this, for 
 despite the time and money expended in behalf of crusades to remove this social 
 bane there are yet in the metropolis more than one hundred thousand rooms in 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 71 
 
 which human beings live without natural light or ventilation save that which 
 comes through the one door that gives access to a passage way equally dark 
 and gloomy. 
 
 In the beginning of this series of articles the statement was made that if 
 there were dark rooms in Texas the writer's investigation had failed to elicit 
 information concerning their whereabouts. This statement at that time was true. 
 The time allowed for the investigation was not sufficient, as one would quickly 
 surmise, to permit a house-to-house inspection throughout the larger cities of 
 the State, and had it not been for the very systematic and complete survey of 
 the city of Houston, made recently by the social service committee of the Men 
 and Religion Forward Movemeent, such information, perhaps, would have been 
 long in coming to the public. 
 
 Under the immediate direction of J. P. Kranz, secretary, this committee 
 instituted and completed a careful survey of the city of Houston, particularly 
 with respect to housing conditions prevailing there. Assisting Mr. Kranz, who 
 is. himself, a social worker of many years' experience in the North. East and 
 South, were a corps of experts whose training has been especially in the field 
 of social surveying. A house-to-house inspection was made of those sections 
 of the city given over largely to the residences of working people, and toward the 
 end of the survey the social workers reported the information to headquarters 
 that they had discovered a dozen or more dark rooms in some of the town's 
 multiple residences. This information Mr. Kranz, himself, set out to verify and 
 courteously permitted the writer to accompany him. A few moments' walk from 
 the Y. M. C. A. Building brought the party to the first house indicated by the 
 surveyors. In a trice Mr. Kranz had opened the doors of dark rooms embodying 
 every essential detail of that housing evil; and their pernicious influence was 
 aggravated, as the case is frequently, if not usually found to be, by a degree of 
 overcrowding which, in the absence of actual observation, is largely inconceivable. 
 
 The building was a large workingman's rooming house, situated almost 
 within the heart of the city. It occupied a position between two structures 
 equally large, the lower floor being devoted to commercial purposes, the upper 
 t.j the housing of dozens of tenants. Climbing a long flight of stairs the visitors 
 found themselves in a small hall or reception room that opened into a passage 
 way which ran the full length of the building. Rooms opened to this hall as do 
 the rooms of hotels. Everything was dark, the faint glimmerings of light that 
 flickered through an overhead transom being insufficient to illuminate the hall. 
 A heavy, sickening incense filled the air. It was not the fumes of burning 
 disinfectants. The dark surroundings and faint pallor of whitewashed walls 
 suggested a place uncanny an appropriate vestibule for the swinging of heathen 
 censers to cruel, unsympathetic and voracious gods. 
 
 The visitors proceeded down the dark hall and opened the first door on the 
 left. Abyssmal blackness met the eye. Not a faint ray of light, not an object 
 could be seen. Gradually becoming accustomed to the darkness the vision began 
 to penetrate the gloom of the room and discern blacker things which the light of 
 a match later showed to be beds. They were double beds and there were three 
 of them. The room was, perhaps, eighteen feet long by ten or twelve feet wide. 
 The ceiling and walls were plastered bleak and bare. The door through which 
 entrance was obtained was the only outlet of the room. Not a window nor a 
 transom nor a ventilator could be perceived. A threadbare rug partially covered 
 the floor. Three chairs completed the furnishings. Not a washstand, a bureau 
 
72 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 nor a mirror was in view. A single incandescent light was suspended from the 
 ceiling by a corded wire. And above the damp and musty odor that pervaded 
 the room arose the pungent scent-particles of that strange aroma which filled' 
 the hall. 
 
 The next room was visited, then another and another. All were dark. All 
 depended for light and ventilation upon the doors that opened into the hall. 
 None had even a window opening to the adjoining room. None had a complete 
 equipment of furniture. All had three double beds apiece. And to them all that 
 heavy, sickening perfume had permeated. 
 
 The rooms on one side of the house were dark every one of them. An 
 airshaft on the opposite side saved the compartments of that part of the building 
 from being entirely dark. But the light and ventilation it gave were meag?r. 
 These rooms were hardly more desirable than the others. 
 
 In the rear of the hall was found the sink at which the water supply was 
 procured. Near-by was the toilet, inadequately partitioned off from the hall. 
 With those the list of conveniences ended. 
 
 ' The mistress of the house shortly appeared on the scene, and immediately 
 cleared up the mystery of the incense. 
 
 ' "I burn that," she said, "to get rid of the bad odors that arise from so many 
 people sleeping in the house." 
 
 She held out a handful of small aromatic crystals which she took from her 
 apron pocket. 
 
 "Why don't you fumigate with disinfectants?" she was asked. 
 
 She didn't know what to disinfect with, she said. No one had ever told her, 
 and thinking, perhaps, that the infection was removed when the smell had gone, 
 she had done the best thing she could to protect her house from contagion. 
 Advised as to what to do. she thanked her informant effusively and promised to 
 try the new method at once and abandon the use of her makeshift censers. 
 
 Yet. this woman's house was clean. It was free of superficial dirt, anyway. 
 The coverings of the. beds in the rooms that were viewed were neatly spread iml 
 the floors appeared to have been thoroughly swept. The meager furnishings 
 were arranged with due regard for order. There were no evidences of 
 shiftlessness on the part of the proprietor. She, as well as her hapless roomers, 
 was the victim of thoughtless construction and unsanitary arrangement of f he 
 house in which she lived. Her efforts to do her duty as the matron of a lodging 
 house were established by her persistent, though ineffectual use of incense as a 
 means of preventing disease. She merely needed instruction and an adequate 
 house to relieve her lodgers of their pernicious environment. 
 
 This house with its dark rooms is typical of other conditions in Houston 
 though they are not of frequent occurrence. And it is perhaps typical of 
 conditions in other cities of Texas though nowhere else were dark rooms seen 
 on the writer's tour of investigation. It is probable that in the absence of a 
 house-to-house canvass, such as was made by the social service committee in 
 Houston, nothing but the merest accident would reveal them. Hidden away in 
 remote places, and existing doubtless only in small numbers, they are difficult 
 to find. This is one of the hopeful features of the housing problem as it is 
 affected by houses of such construction. It can be solved immediately and 
 prevented from arising again simply by a process of legislation. If landlords 
 hereafter are permitted to construct houses for rental purposes without first 
 having conformed to definite legal provisions in their plans, dark rooms may be 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 73 
 
 expected to grow in number. If lodging houses shall be constructed without 
 rtgard to light and ventilation, and every available space shall be used for rental 
 purposes, there will be no means of preventing the occurrence of dark rooms. If 
 the bigger houses of the rich are permitted to become the made-over tenements 
 of the poor, greed, necessity and false economy will conspire to increase the 
 frequency of dark rooms. For it is unquestionably a simpler task to build houses 
 with windows in every room than it is to compel their installation after the house 
 shall have been erected. 
 
 The dark room requires no condemnation other than a complete under- 
 standing of what it is. That conveyed to the public, the dark room then become? 
 its own aggressive enemy. 
 
 OVERCROWDING IN HOUSTON IS ONE OF 
 
 CITY'S IMPORTANT SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 9.) 
 
 Houston, as every city that has real housing problems, is overcrowded in 
 parts. That is, residences are made to accommodate too many occupants to pro- 
 mote conditions conducive to health and morality, and the houses, themselves, 
 are built too close together to provide ample area for adequate sanitation, privacy, 
 quiet and the home playground that should be at the disposal of the children. 
 
 To determine where crowding ends and overcrowding begins, is something 
 of a difficult undertaking. The best authorities on housing and sanitation declare 
 that there can be no fixed standards by which these evils shall be guaged, because 
 surrounding conditions often exert determining influences rather than does the 
 bare fact of so many people on so much ground or in so many rooms. For an example 
 it can not in justice be required that an acre of ground shall never accommodate 
 residents in excess of 200 or 300 or 500. The evil of overcrowding depends rather 
 upon how they are accommodated than upon the number of people residing on an 
 acre of land. Hundreds of persons may live in the tall hotels of the country, 
 occupying, perhaps, no more ground base than one acre or thereabouts, but no 
 one could justly describe conditions prevailing within the hotels as overcrowded. 
 Lawrence Veiller writes in his excellent work on "Housing Reform" that he 
 does not believe an arbitrary standard may be adopted by which overcrowding 
 may be determined. "In some parts of China," he says, "where the number ot 
 people to the acre is very much less than it is in many parts of modern New York, 
 conditions of living are infinitely worse from the point of view of overcrowding 
 and congestion. Congestion and overcrowding are not to be 
 
 determined by the number of people living on a given area of land. The vital 
 question is the distribution of such population, the actual close proximity in which 
 people live." 
 
 In Houston and the same is true of Dallas, Galveston, San Antonio and 
 ether large cities of Texas conditions fully meet this definition. There is over- 
 crowding of limited areas of land with an undue population, brought about by the 
 close proximity of the houses in which people live, resulting in congestion, and 
 there is also the overcrowding of rooms within the houses. As between the two 
 there is little choice. Both are baneful and pernicious conditions, and when found 
 together, their influence for evil augments in potency. 
 
 STANDARD NOT INFALLIBLE. 
 
 The standard of a minimum volume of cubic air space has been the only 
 medium adopted in this country to determine room overcrowding. In many 
 cities this standard has been 400 cubic feet of air for each adult and 200 for each 
 child under 12 years of age occupying a room. And yet this standard is declared 
 to be of little value, because adherence to it would not necessarily bring about 
 conditions of living beneficial to the occupants of the room. The kind of air 
 that is provided is as vital as the quantity. And the frequency of its renewal is 
 

76 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 of equal importance. Mr. Veiller says it "makes a very great difference whether 
 the air comes from a broad street or from a narrow alley, from a large backyard 
 or from a narrow airsjjaft." 
 
 It will be necessary to cite but a few illustrations to show the evils of over- 
 crowding as it prevails in Houston among the residences of unskilled working 
 people. There are innumerable instances of overcrowding that defy both the 
 sanitary requirement of sufficient volume of air and that of its frequent and 
 adequate renewal. 
 
 In some of the dark rooms, spoken of in a previous article, found in Houston, 
 provision is made for the sleeping of six persons. The rooms are not large rooms, 
 containing, perhaps, no more than 1,500 cubic feet of air. The pro-rata part of 
 that volume of air to each six occupants would be 250 cubic feet. That is 150 
 cubic feet of air below the standard adopted generally througpout the United 
 States. Well ventilated,' though it might be, it is plausible to assume that so small 
 a quantity of air would be insufficient to meet the requirements of health. But 
 well ventilated such rooms are not. Their only means of ventilation is the 
 doorway opening upon the hall or to another room. Fresh air iuiced by pressure 
 through the hall would not provide thorough circulation to these rooms. They 
 are absolutely cut off from ventilation as well as light. One may well imagine 
 how quickly the supply of air be vitiated by the respiration of six occupants. 
 
 Again, the writer saw four large rooms, approximately 15x15x8 in dimensions, 
 situated in a direct line with doors opening from one to another, each with eight 
 single beds neatly arranged along the walls of the room. Two windows were 
 cut in each room, opening to a narrow airshaft formed by the proximity of another 
 building. Opposite these windows doors opened into other rooms. They were 
 customarily kept closed The volume of air in each of these sleeping rooms was 
 reduced to about 280 cubic feet for each occupant. Its renewal was not sufficient 
 to the needs of the residents. When cold weather comes there is no ventilation 
 at night. The windows are kept closed, the doors are shut, and the many 
 sleepers are compelled to breathe throughout the night air that is not provided in 
 sufficient volume to give each hie full quota under prevailing standards, and 
 which is also robbed of its purity by the natural processes of respiration. 
 
 OVERCROWDING IN SMALL HOUSES. 
 
 Then, in the smaller houses overcrowding prevails widely in Houston. Here 
 vas found a house, the six rooms of which (one being a kitchen) contained thir- 
 teen people. Another house of four rooms (one being a kitchen) provides accom- 
 modations for thirteen people. Still another group of thirteen people were housed 
 in five rooms, one being, also, a kitchen. Seven of these residents were adults. 
 Another instance was found of fourteen persons (eight of them adults) living in 
 five rooms, one of which was a kitchen. And still another house of six rooms 
 (one a kitchen) accommodated eleven adults and two children. 
 
 These are merely instances typical of conditions that widely prevail in 
 Houston. And they are also typical of conditions in other cities of the State. 
 Housing laws are lacking and there is no legal prohibition imposed upon the 
 landlord or the renter against overcrowding houses to the point of injury to 
 health and social standards. And yet the enactment of measures contemplating 
 relief for such conditions is a matter of difficulty. To this point Mr. Veiller 
 rfpvnfps extended discussion in his recent work. Summarizing he say' 
 
 "No adequate method has yet been devised of effectively preventing room 
 overcrowding. The attempts made thus far have all been in the direction of 
 limiting by law the number of people occupying a room with reference to the 
 amount of cubic air space in it. Unfortunately, such a provision is almost impos- 
 sible of enforcement. In order to enforce it, inspections must be made at night. 
 It is only then that the lodgers and boarders, the chief causes of overcrowding, 
 are to be found. To question the tenement dwellers in the daytime with regard 
 to their practice of taking in boarders or lodgers, is to ask them to convict them- 
 selves, and such investigations are rbviously of little value. To adequately carry 
 on night inspections of the homes of the poor would require an army of inspectors. 
 It would involve, moreover, an invasion of the privacy of the home, which is 
 repugnant to American institutions. The routing out of working-men's families 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 77 
 
 ifter midnight in order to determine whether they have boarders or lodgers 
 living with them would be intolerable. 
 
 "To 'cope with the problem of overcrowding and the lodger evil effectively, 
 the law should place upon the landlord the responsibility for an undue number 
 of people in his house, as it has already placed upon him, in the case of women 
 of ill repute, responsibility for their character. In certain classes of tenements 
 the taking in of lodgers or boarders, except with the written consent of the land- 
 lord, must be prohibited and the landlord must be held responsible for any 
 departure from this rule. This principle has not as yet been recognized by any 
 American city, but it is one that must be established if this evil is to be overcome." 
 
 Texas cities, therefore, have an opportunity to become pioneers in this field 
 of social endeavor. Conditions, easily ascertainable by persons interested, clearly 
 demonstrate the necessity for something of the kind to be done. 
 
 CITY'S INATTENTION TO SURROUNDINGS 
 AUGMENTS HOUSTON'S HOUSING PROBLEM 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 10.) 
 
 Complicating the housing problem in Houston as the case has proved to be 
 in all the leading cities of Texas is the city's own heedlessness of or inattention 
 to physical conditions that have arisen outside of the homes 'from the continued 
 ignorance or neglect of the public. It is true that Texas cities have grown so 
 rapidly during the last few years that they have been virtually unable to 
 accompany their growth by adequate facilities to the proper living of communities 
 which it is the function of municipal government to provide. Nevertheless, it is 
 for this reason especially that public effort toward the elimination of undesirable 
 conditions and the extension of the good should be redoubled, otherwise control 
 may never be acquired over certain phases of the social problem. 
 
 A survey of the city reveals first the inadequacy of the sewer system. It 
 is not co-extensive with the territory of the municipality, and where mains are 
 accessible to property, connection is not always enforced. As a result of this 
 there are in Houston a large number of surface closets, together with numerous 
 though isolated systems of cesspools. There are frequent instances of makeshift 
 sewers, used largely for drainage purposes, which have been constructed by the 
 tenants or under theirs or the landlord's supervision without regard for sanitary 
 regulations. Pipes for such purposes lead from the kitchen overground to the 
 nearest ravine running into Buffalo Bayou. All manner of liquid refuse is 
 conveyed through them to gullies not remote from the houses, there to drain 
 slowly to the stream further away. 
 
 SEWER .SYSTEM IS INADEQUATE. 
 
 .One illustration of this negligence of sewer regulations comes graphically tc 
 mind. Going down a narrow cul de sac situated near the bayou a turn through 
 a gate reveals two rows of houses facing each other on the bank of the stream, 
 a fence dividing them. One of the rows is composed of ramshackle dwellings, 
 built high upon stilts to give a semblance of a common floor level. The other 
 row comprises a number of; rather neat cottages erected upon ground that gives 
 many evidences of having been made by layer upon layer of the city's trash 
 and refuse. -At -the -end of the property the -bank of the bayou is being filled in by 
 a similar process. Between the stream and these rows of houses is a wide space 
 of ground devoted to the maintenance of horses and cattle. A rough system of 
 sewerage connects these dwellings with the horse lot. However, it is not used 
 
80 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 for the removal of fecal wastes. One row of houses is connected with a cesspool 
 constructed under one of the buildings; the other uses surface closets. The 
 surrounding premises are in bad condition from a sanitary viewpoint and from 
 them arises a decidedly noisome odor. 
 
 A house-to-house inspection of 100 dwellings in a certain part of Houston 
 was made. The territory is by no means the worst in the city, inasmuch as fortv 
 of the hous.es faced paved streets, forty-two had cement sidewalks and nine had 
 walks constructed of brick. Nevertheless, only thirty-three of these houses had 
 sanitary closets. Seventy-one had surface closets. The excess of the total 
 JOG is accounted for by the fact that some of the houses had both sanitary and 
 surface closets. 
 
 In this neighborhood one instance was found of three families using one 
 closet, one instance of four families using the same closet, and one instance of 
 eight. Likewise, there were discovered two instances of five families using one 
 water tap and one instance of eight families depending upon one hydrant for 
 their water supply. Of course, they had to go after the water and bring it home 
 in buckets. The number of bathtubs bore a more or less constant ratio to the 
 number of sanitary sewers. Most of these houses were rental property, only 
 sixteen being owned by their occupants. 
 
 OPEN GUTTERS ARE FREQUENT. 
 
 There are many open gutters in Houston that poorly fulfill their function, 
 mere ditches to whicn little attention is apparently paid. Weeds grow up and 
 interfere with the flow of rain water and cause pools to form and stagnate, 
 affording ideal cultures for the propagation of mosquitoes. Eighty of the 100 
 houses previously referred to faced open gutters of this type, and before twenty- 
 one of them stagnant pools of water were found. Conditions of the kind are 
 frequently found to be in a state of nuisance. 
 
 And. perhaps, more remarkable than anything in connection with the survey 
 of this territory of the city, was the discovery that in not a single instance 
 among these one hundred houses was the municipal ordinance regarding the 
 collection andlcare of garbage complied with. The ordinance prescribes a non- 
 leakable covered can, and these are what was found: Forty-one boxes, eighteen 
 tubs, four barrels, four tin cans. Twenty-six houses had no receptacle for 
 garbage whatsoever. Similarly, thirty-one of these houses were screened; the 
 others were not screened despite the necessity for screening and the use of other 
 methods of controlling the mosquito pest in the coast country. 
 
 In Houston, too. are found the jacals of San Antonio. There is a row of 
 them along the banks of the Bayou not a remote distance from the heart of ihe 
 city. They have been constructed of tins, sheet iron, barrel staves, boxes and 
 any other available material which the junk heaps of the dumping ground may 
 have provided. The little shacks have^ been in existence a long time. One of 
 the occupants pointed to a tall tree growing beside the door of his hut and told 
 the writer that he had planted "just a little switch fifeen years ago" when he 
 took possession of the site and began the construction of his hovel. This man 
 owned two of the structures, one of which he used for sleeping and the other 
 for cooking purposes. However, with the coming of cold weather he closed up 
 his- sleeping apartment and cooked, ate and slumbered in his crowded little 
 kitchen. During a brief conversation this long-time resident told the writer that 
 the city owned the land on which the shacks were built. No restrictions were 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 81 
 
 placed upon occupancy. A family could enter the lot and build its own dwelling 
 place under the common acceptance, perhaps, of squatters' rights. Shacks 
 become vacant and soon are occupied again. The population is more or less 
 transient all but the old timer. Like Tennyson's brook, tenants come and go, 
 but the original settler goes on forever. The day the writer visited this row of 
 huts a Mexican family occupied one of them, a crippled white woman and her 
 daughter another, and transient lodgers, seeking a night's refuge from the 
 weather, were sharing the shelter, such as it was, of the others. The old man 
 was the only permanent dweller of the row. 
 
 AUSTIN IS NOT CONFRONTED BY A 
 
 SERIOUS HOUSING PROBLEM AT PRESENT 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 11.) 
 
 Of the conspicuous cities of Texas Austin is perhaps the least inflicted with 
 housing troubles. As Galveston, the city has comparatively few poor inhabitants. 
 It is an educational rather than an industrial or a commercial center, and therefore 
 it does not offer the same advantages of employment to working people that are. 
 held out by other cities of the State. As a result of this Austin has not been 
 driven to the extremities of housing that have followed industrial development 
 elsewhere, and overcrowding of homes and congestion of premises are housing 
 evils that are comparatively unknown in the Capital, although, to be sure, there 
 are found here and there isolated instances that serve to show the tendency to 
 improper growth wherever conditions arise in a city that are not under absolute 
 control of its authorities. 
 
 However, Austin is looking forward to considerable industrial development 
 following the completion of the contemplated dam across the Colorado River 
 above the town. Before the first dam broke, about ten years ago, the city was 
 on the highway to success as a manufacturing center, inasmuch as the power 
 necessary to move the machinery of all kinds of factories was provided in plenty 
 and at reasonable rates. With the breaking of the dam, blasting encouraging 
 prospects and plunging the city into debt, the Capital entered a decade of 
 depression from which it is emerging successfully and by the mistakes of which 
 it seeks to profit in its future activities. Should the dam be restored as present 
 indications predict the leading citizens of the town foretell for Austin a brilliant 
 future. It will doubtless develop manufactures as an important part of its 
 industrial life. If so, factory hands and their families will come to the city in 
 large numbers and will want homes. If Austin fail to provide for them in 
 advance, a few years will suffice indubitably to present a housing problem as 
 difficult of solution as that which confronts the other growing industrial centers 
 of the State. Thus far the city has done little municipal planning as the cause 
 and inspiration of its renaissance commission government has not been in use 
 long enough to bring about all the betterments and improvements that are 
 contemplated. Nevertheless, there is need of city planning at the Capital, and 
 in the event of the dam's comoletion and the development of manufacturing 
 industries there, the necessity will manifest itself more vividly as the years roll by. 
 
 The city is growing with noticeable rapidity. In nowise is it crowded now 
 from a housing viewpoint, yet the encroachment of evil .housing conditions is so 
 insidious and deceptive that it should behoove every community that can prevent 
 undesirable consequences to employ preclusive means rather than to wait for the 
 coming of difficulties and irritate it c elf by the discouraging task of cure. 
 
 SOME RAMSHACKLE HOUSES THERE. 
 
 Perhaps the most noticeable inadequacy of housing in Austin is the 
 ramshackle condition of dwellings in the older settlements, together with the 
 incompleteness of the sewer system. Negro homes are as a rule in poor condition 
 physically and ^re not maintained in accordance with the provisions of the 
 sanitary code. Along the banks of streams that flow through the town numerous 
 
82 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 isolated instances of bad housing occur, although there are only infrequent cases 
 of collective evils. There are a few groups of tenant houses, comparatively 
 speaking, that exhibit the evil of congested premises, but as a rule, taking the 
 sections occupied by working people as a whole, the houses are situated upon 
 large lots and are not representative of a sole desire to wring the greatest amount 
 of revenue out of the smallest possible investment. 
 
 The city's streets are not good, save those upon which the administration has 
 been at work. One of the prominent defects of the town is its meager paving. 
 But the authorities have designed a plan of improvement that is progressing 
 rapidly in its execution, much to the beautification of the town as well as to its 
 substantial betterment. The residential districts have not yet been reached in 
 the working out of this program of civic improvement. They will be given 
 attention in the due course of progress. And with the plan of street improvement 
 naturally goes that of extending the sewer system commensurate with the 
 territory of the town. When this shall have been done, surface outhouses will 
 disappear, thereby relieving the city of the nuisance inevitably attending limited 
 systems of sewerage. 
 
 There are in Austin a number of enterprises looking to the provision of 
 homes for working people. These are succeeding as a rule, and in their success, 
 if in nothing else immediately apparent, the growth and augmenting prosperity 
 of the town are shown. Additions are being opened on sites not too remote from 
 the heart of the business district in which people of limited means may procure 
 homes upon terms they are able to meet. The class of homes that are filling up 
 these additions is good. There is apparent an effort to beautify the premises as 
 well as to provide in the home the more necessary elements of a home. Enter- 
 prises of this character have served to increase the number of homes that are 
 owned by their occupants in the long run the safe and certain solution of the 
 housing problem. 
 
 CROWDING OF HOUSES IS REDUCED TO 
 
 A SCIENCE IN CITY OF FORT WORTH 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 12.) 
 
 In the continuous effort of solving those problems' of housing which encroach 
 at first so unobtrusively upon the social arrangement of a city. Fort Worth has 
 had to a marked extent the assistance of organized labor. The influence of 
 unionism toward the improvement of social conditions, and especially in its effect 
 upon means of housing the working people of restricted earning power, has been 
 exerted both directly and indirectly, but it is, perhaps, due more considerably to 
 its indirect exercise that the principles of proper housing have been given wide 
 application among that portion of the citizenship that depends for its livelihood 
 upon limited means. This is manifested in the large proportion that union labor 
 bears to the entire citizenship and to the whole body of working people, and is 
 emphasized in the large percentage of home-owners among those of small revenue. 
 
 Ownrship of homes seems to be a prominent ambition among Fort Worth's 
 working people, both skilled and unskilled, and where this ambition has been 
 realized or is being gradually attained through processes of thrift, saving and 
 investment, there is no evidence of a deep-seated housing problem. Housing 
 difficulties therefore, in Fort Worth, concern chiefly the negroes and the less 
 competent of the unskilled workmen who are chiefly foreigners. It has been 
 shown repeatedly by extensive statistics of unquestionable accuracy that housing 
 problems arise and develop in direct proportion to the ratio which rental property 
 of residential character bears to the ownership of homes. And where working 
 people, skilled or unskilled, have acquired the habit of saving or investing what 
 little they have in the construction and equipment of a home small and spare 
 though it be it is inevitably disclosed that evil housing conditions are coming 
 in line for ultimate if not immediate remedy. The large percentage of union labor 
 has reduced the ratio of unskilled labor in Fort Worth and ha> correspondingly 
 ameliorated conditions of housing that prevailed hitherto by stimulating ambition 
 for home ownership through an increased basis of compensation. This is the 
 writer's information from several exalted and dependable sources. 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 83 
 
 CONTRAST OF CONDITIONS IS VIVID. 
 
 Nptwithstanding this condition of affairs the preponderance of union labor 
 and the benefits that it has wrought working people with respect to their homes 
 the fellow at the bottom of the social ladder has a pretty hard time in Fort 
 Worth. Of course, he has a rough path to follow wherever he may chance to be, 
 but the contrast between his condition and that of the chap just a little higher 
 up on the next rung, say was perhaps never more vividly revealed than it is in 
 this thriving city by the Trinity. The operation of inexorable social laws has 
 been intensified in its blasting effect by the intrusion, at times, of inordinate 
 greed, which seems determined to sate itself even at the expense of civic pride 
 and the basic sentiments of humanity. 
 
 Crowding of houses has become something of a structural art in Fort Worth. 
 It has been reduced to the basis of scientific accuracy. An observer can not well 
 escape the conclusion that arrangement has been the subject of repeated 
 mathematical calculations, the means involved being the smallest expenditure 
 possible under a grasping, usurious policy of business and the end the greatest 
 housing capacity possible to a cold, mercenary plan. No thought, apparently, is 
 given the tenant; all thought is to the revenue to the landlord his occupancy 
 will yield. 
 
 To build the greatest number of houses possible to a given area, entire city 
 blocks have been quartered by narrow alleys hardly wide enough to permit the 
 passage of a wagon drawn by a team of horses. Then, upon each quarter-section 
 of the block, rows of houses will be erected, two of them facing the street, two 
 of them the alleys. The whole gives the appearance of portions of a miniature 
 city, with small streets and small houses for small people a town like that to 
 which the travels of Gulliver led him when he stumbled upon the precincts of the 
 Lilliputians. There can be no air the houses are too close together, and the 
 small alleys do not provide sufficient space for proper renewal. There can be no 
 privacy. Everybody knows what .his neighbor is doing, and if he chance to retire 
 before everybody else in the community has gone to bed. he must be well trained 
 in courting Morpheus to slip off into Slumberiand despite the hubbub surrounding 
 him. A sick person, a sufferer of nervous diseases, has about three chances for 
 health to ninety-seven for insanity, in the midst of the ordinary nightly babel and 
 neighboring entertainments. 
 
 SPECULATOR ON THE SCENE. 
 
 And in this character of business a peculiar traffic has arisen. Such properties 
 are undoubtedly good investments. All over Texas landlords have admitted this 
 fact. They say it's hard money, but good money, meaning that it has to be 
 watched carefully to avoid its escape through tenants who are given themselves, 
 at times, to methods of shrewdness. Twenty to thirty per cent piofit is not an 
 infrequent revenue derived from the ownership of such property. But it is not 
 always a certain, definite quantity. And when the earning power of the holdings 
 is gauged by the capacity of selected periods of the year when the houses are 
 crowded it appears more financially alluring than it really proves to be. With 
 this knowledge, houses have been built in Fort Worth and efforts made to fill 
 them with occupants the greatest number possible in order to disclose a 
 remarkable revenue. The usual plan of lot crowding has been followed. House 
 after house, house after .house, has been placed upon a block and filled with 
 tenants by the diligent effort, undoubtedly, of the speculator. Then, stressing 
 the value of the property as a revenue earner, the speculator finds a credulous 
 purchaser and disposes of it at a figure based upon its maximum dividends. When 
 the purchaser finds that his property only brings him 20% a year, whereas it was 
 sold to him, perhaps, upon a reliable representation of 30%, he exhibits his 
 thorough appreciation of being "stung" by declining to keep it in repair, and 
 allows it to run its own course of deterioration to the discredit of the city and 
 the unhappine?s of the tenant. 
 
 This practice, it is learned, used to prevail to a greater extent than it does 
 now, although it is yet more or less in vogue. It is naturally frowned down upon 
 by legitimate business and is universally censured by those who have the welfare 
 of the city and the prosperity of its people at heart. In a conversation with the 
 
*4 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 writer. Mayor Davis caustically censured the principles of this kind of business, 
 saying that it was not only a wrongful policy judged by business standard*, but! 
 moreover, it hampered the work of the city toward the elevation of the standards 
 of living among its working peop'e. In its efforts to beautify the city and make 
 it more substantial, the municipal administration is at times handicapped by 
 having an improved section of the town c et back in its development by under- 
 takings of this kind. From every viewpoint, therefore, the practice is condemned. 
 That is from every viewpoint but that of the successful speculator. To him, 
 perhaps, it paves the way to a gilt-edge proposition. 
 
 TORT WORTH'S SHACKS AND SHANTIES 
 FORM SERIOUS PART OF HOUSING PROBLEM 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 13.) 
 
 Fort Worth has its quota of shacks and shanties. They border the business 
 district, intrude themselves upon the residential areas of the well-to-do, and, 
 intensifying the dull aspect of the Trinity River bottom, form the conspicuous 
 breach in the continuity of modern appearances which gives to the North Side 
 and the original city their metropolitan compactness. They appear in divers 
 shapes and sizes. Their patterns some of them are relics of types of archi- 
 tecture now archaic, and their grim, suggestive visages conjure up the imaginings 
 of childhood's ghost-lore. A fit place, one says of them, for the mysterious 
 prowlings of midnight specters, the commission of ugly, uncanny deeds or the 
 sequestration of rich caches of plunder. Scenes most unlovely under the bright 
 eye of day, they become foreboding illusions when cast upon' the dark screen of 
 night, and are objects which the caution of the belated pedestrian peremptorily 
 urges him to avoid. 
 
 About these huts and hovels of the Trinity there is nothing of the strange 
 witchery of the jacals of the San Antonio. 'Way down South, amid the cactus and 
 the chapparal, the rough-fashioned dwellings of bronze, sombreroed people, 
 skirting the city, seem somehow to blend their bizarre arrangement in the pic- 
 turesciueness of the bordering wilds. No such subtle charm attaches to the ram- 
 shackle cabins of the Trinity. Their, crudeness, insufferable state of repair: 
 the unsanitary environment in which they repose; their utter lack of proper 
 equipment for respectable living all these elements in their totality impose an 
 incongruous blight upon the city that robs its very heart of the metropolitan 
 aspect it should so proudly wear. 
 
 The bottom of the Trinity, separating the North Side from the larger terri- 
 tory of the city, is studded with these uninviting structures. They appear alone 
 and in groups. Some bear faint evidences of an original plan; many of them 
 do not, revealing rather as their guiding impulse a sole desire to throw together, 
 haphazard, as it were, enouerh boards and scantlings to provide a temporary 
 shelter in a time of storm. At best they are not living places, because of their 
 situation. Low of altitude, they are naturally subjected to constant waves of 
 noxious miasmata of the bottom lands. Compounded with these, the noisome 
 effluvia of the slaughter pens and neighboring junk heaps could not be well 
 expected to contribute to the joy of respiration nor to the health of residence 
 there. 
 
 They are peopled with the noor the flotsam and jetsam of the social tide 
 that ask not for better because they do. not know how to ask. They have trained 
 themselves to a sort of contentment, at least to a habit of living, that does not 
 nermit complaint of things that cnn not be helped. They evince a stoicism more 
 indurated by the cold processes of circumstance than elevated bv the noble influ- 
 ence of fortitude. They want little, have less and never expect more. So why 
 should it not suffice th-it they continue as they are? Society's disdainful question 
 may some day be answered unexpectedly. 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 85 
 
 PROBLEM OF THE MUD. 
 
 Across the river, on the North Side, one enters the atmosphere of a foreign 
 clime. The chatter of strange tongues comes to the ears from litttle groups of 
 men idling on the streets or from husky housewives bending diligently over wash- 
 tubs in back yards cluttered with heterogeneous masses of trash that defy assort- 
 ment into their multifarious forms. The musical prattle of children at their play in 
 volume alone insures at least one section of the commonwealth against the 
 calamity of race suicide. Opportunity there is unlimited for the pronouncement 
 of Rooseveltian benisons. 
 
 On and on one may go through a city of little homes. Many of them are 
 neat and attractive, evidencing painstaking care in their up-keep. These, beyond 
 doubt, are owned by their occupants. They have the atmosphere of home. Their 
 premises are not neglected and the houses reveal in appearance the fulfillment of 
 functions other than the mere provision of refuge from the weather. 
 
 And then there are others many of them. They are indeed a grewsome 
 spectacle. Rattletrap affairs that threaten to fall before the first harsh gust of 
 , wind. Roofs that leak and sometimes blow away; casements torn out and rem- 
 nants of abandoned blankets filled in; porches broken at each end or in the middle, 
 leading to dark and gloomy hallways that open into drearier rooms; doors hang- 
 ing, neglected, from rusty, broken hinges; fences that have long since lost their 
 continuity and their service; outhouses in the last stages of dismemberment, 
 poisoning the air with their effluent odors; front and back yards littered with 
 trash and refuse and the whole premises floating, figuratively, in a viscous sea 
 of mud these elements form the picture of parts of the Bohunk district of Fort 
 Worth's North Side on the third day of a slow, continuous rain. 
 
 That mud! Ankle-deep wasn't even the beginning. Crossing the street or 
 pursuing his way along the sidewalk or across some private premises, one might 
 seek to pick his route in vain. .It soon reduced itself to a proposition of clinching 
 the teeth and grimly stalking ahead with a muttered imprecation upon the bad 
 fix in which he found himself, together with a fleet though fervent thought of 
 thankfulness that he didn't wear low-quartered shoes. If he had, they would 
 never have come out of that mud on his feet. Mud to the right of him. mud to 
 the left of him, enveloped the scene, and, warm and perspiring with the repeated 
 exertion of extricating one foot from the reluctant tentacles of one place only to 
 have the other seized with a firmer hold, the pedestrian, pausing to gaze uoon 
 the countless pools in their muddy beds, doubtless repined with the Ancient 
 Mariner as to the ubiquity of the water and the nothingness of the drink. 
 
 IMPROVEMENT PAYS IN LONG RUN. 
 
 And in it all these people lived. The pretty pavements of which the Panther 
 Citv boasts do not extend to the house-fronts of Door people y like these. But, 
 perhaps, they do not want them. Loblollies are such a relief, anyway after they 
 are gone. That is the case if people of the kind can extract from circumstance 
 the sarne philosophy that inspired the Irishman in the story to pound his toe with 
 a hammer "because it felt so good when it quit hurtingr." But as to decent and 
 sanitary living it is hardlv possible amid such surroundings as these. It is true 
 that when the weather is fair there is no mud, but when it rains the situation in 
 seme parts of the section becomes almost unbearable. 
 
 Anticipating the criticism of business men that it would hot pay to spend 
 money for the improvement of public property surrounding such premises as 
 these, it is granted at once that compensation would not come immediately. 
 Owners of poor property do not feel justified in payiner for improvements that 
 increase their investments and do not materiallv raise their revenue. And, 
 mathematically, they can demonstrate to the final dollar the fatuity of such busi- 
 ness policy. But business rpre'y fie.uo^ far ahead. It almost never calculates 
 beyond its own generation For such a re nod it is undoubtedly unwise from a 
 business standpoint to jeopardize interest- be.'' ring holdings by enhancing their 
 cost without prospect of auqfmertinq- tbeir vield Nevertheless, in the long run, 
 And it is the long run, and the long run alone, that policy is indubitable nmvise. 
 that society must take into account in dealing with problems of this kind. A 
 little spirit of "philanthropy ?.nd 5 per cent" will work wonders in a community 
 
86 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 eventually, even though sage business men doubt its wisdom and are prone to 
 charge its application exclusively to the chanty account. Then, tco, the element 
 of civic pride enters to compensate in the everlasting reward of inward satisfac- 
 tion for whatever attending curtailment of revenue the proper, patriotic, philan- 
 thropic course might produce. 
 
 PROPER HOUSING OF FOREIGN ELEMENT 
 
 GIVES FORT WORTH IMPORTANT TASK 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 14.) 
 
 Like all cities of Texas that have devoted little or no attention to the housing 
 of their unskilled working people, Fort Worth finds itself, upon investigation, 
 confronted by all the attending problems of improper methods and means of 
 living. Especially in those districts given over largely to the residence of foreign 
 laborers are conditions of living in most of their phases found to be undesirable 
 and injurious to the permanency of proper social standards. Fort Worth has a 
 large percentage of this type of labor, and sooner or later it will be called upon 
 to deal vigorously with a situation that augments in stubbornness with its 
 continuation. 
 
 The so-called Bohunk population of Fort Worth hardly finds a ready 
 welcome. It comprises, chiefly. Bulgarians, Russians and Poles of the very 
 humblest social standing, who underbid Americans in the matter of wages for 
 the employment they seek. They can live on less than the American laborers 
 because they want less and are so constituted mentally and morally that the> 
 will readily endure the more of life's discomforts. In consequence the conditions 
 of living that surround them reveal the acme of social degradation. 
 
 Overcrowding is found at its worst in Fort Worth among the sordid homes 
 of these helpless foreigners. It occurs in the individual houses occupied by 
 separate families who are forced to sublet portions of their homes or to bring 
 boarders and lodgers in to make the monthly revenue meet the expense "of actual 
 necessities of life. It is also found in the boarding and rooming houses devoted 
 largely to the accommodation of men. The capacity of living rooms is taxed 
 to the uttermost in the effort to supply sleeping places to the great demand. 
 Where this process of overcrowding goes on, expense of living is proportionately 
 reduced to the person or persons involved, and the incidental saving, it is learned 
 upon dependable information, is more the cause of such conditions than is the 
 lack of quarters wherein less crowded conditions might be enjoyed. These 
 foreigners apparently make rabbit warrens of their homes as much from choice 
 as from necessity. Untutored in hygiene, they do not perceive the unsanitary 
 effect of such modes of living, and when only inconvenience or the absence of 
 privacy is the attending cost, it is readily accepted without murmur on the ground 
 that it is outweighed by the consequent saving in revenue. The result has been 
 that houses stand vacant, which, if occupied, would relieve this condition of 
 congestion, merely because the people who should occupy them largely prefer 
 to crowd themselves into smaller quarters when the attending sacrifice of 
 respectable habits of living is compensated in the saving of a dollar or so a week 
 or a month. This characteristic necessarily complicates the situation, for where 
 apathy on the part of the public meets indifference on the part of the tenant, 
 there is likely to be no immediate movement for betterment of conditions that 
 are at once the bane of both. 
 
 This situation emphasizes the virtue of the principle that the public should 
 deal with conditions injurious to accepted moral and social standards, whether 
 those immediately affected desire assistance or not. Viewed from the high moral 
 standpoint, it does not matter whether the Bohunks want better conditions or 
 whether they would resent apparent interference with their present modes of 
 living. Perhaps the slight saving in money is of vital importance, and it becomes 
 to them the better part of wisdom to submit to overcrowding than to spend their 
 all for more spacious quarters. The fact, nevertheless, remains that it is to 
 society's detriment if conditions are permitted to continue as they now appear, 
 and to its advantage if they are relieved. These foreigners did not come, perhaps. 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 87 
 
 through invitation. But the manner of their coming is not the vital consideration. 
 The fact that they are here is of chief importance, and means to lift them as 
 near to the common standards of social life as available methods and their 
 responsiveness will permit should be the first thought in contemplating their 
 condition. As long as they are allowed to live as they do they continue to be a 
 drag upon the entire citizenship. And if they are -to be eventually assimilated, 
 they should at least be compelled to adopt proper standards of living to prevent or 
 modify whatever evil effect may follow their continuous contact with the social 
 body. The wage competition of these people with labor that wish to maintain 
 better standards of living must be disastrous. 
 
 One story of recent occurrence will suffice to emphasize the situation on the 
 North Side. The Bohunks live like the Chinese, in thickly congested areas, and 
 perhaps bear to the American's eye the same general physical resemblances one to 
 another that are more of less characteristic of Chinese settlements in America. 
 The other day s one of the colony was arrested for some offense. He made bond 
 and presented himself for trial at the appointed time. He was tried and convicted, 
 and before sentence was passed, or he had been placed in the custody of the 
 officers, he deliberately arose, walked through the crowd, left the courtroom, and 
 hasn't been heard of since, though the entire community has been thoroughly 
 searched time and again. Those who presume to knowledge of the ways of these 
 people assert positively that the elusive offender is doubtless pursuing his 
 customary course amid old associates, safe in the concealment of the crowd 
 and the lack of distinct identity which they bear. 
 
 In nowise is the situation yet beyond control. In fact, it is of virtually 
 recent origin, and by vigorous methods on the part of the city it can be relieved 
 and prevented from recurrence. A few more years, however, and it will have., 
 perhaps, passed from control and be subject to remedy only at enormous expense 
 and painstaking care. By far the easier solution involves immediate action 
 rather than radical measures later, when the situation shall have hardened and 
 become less yielding to improvement. 
 
 TEXAS CITIES HAVE COMMON TROUBLES 
 DOMINATING THEIR HOUSING PROBLEMS 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 15.) 
 
 Before presenting a digest of methods that have successfully relieved and 
 precluded undesirable housing conditions in cities of America which have been 
 thoroughly aroused to the need of considering the future in its relation to their 
 material and social development, it may not be amiss to summarize and to 
 emphasize the salient points that have largely dominated this discussion of 
 housing conditions in Texas. Throughout this series of articles it has been the 
 unpretentious effort of the writer to show, first, that a serious housing problem 
 prevails in each of the leading cities of the State; that inasmuch as its presence 
 is usually restricted to comparatively small areas it nowhere presents insuperable 
 obstacles to successful solution, yet, at the same time, by the continuous 
 enhancement of artificial values it is acquiring a strong, tenacious hold upon 
 communities which they may eventually find themselves unable to dislodge; and, 
 finally, that American and European experience and judgment unite in 
 commending the principle of prevention as a medium superior to cure in the 
 intelligent direction and control of social development. 
 
 The housing problem in each of the principal cities of the State has unique 
 phases. In San Antonio the conspicuous question concerns the Mexican laborers. 
 In Fort Worth it is the foreign population that distinguishes the city's problem 
 from the problems of its sister cities. In Dallas the main problem presents itself 
 in the housing of factory workers and of negroes. And thus it goes, around the 
 circle of the State, each city having a peculiar condition to treat by means it may 
 devise and consider best, but each, nevertheless, having certain conditions in 
 common that are basic in the general housing problem which all the leading 
 municipalities are facing. 
 
88 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 OVERCROWDING AND CONGESTION. 
 
 Widely prevalent in Texas, in fact existing to a greater or a lesser degree in 
 all cities inspected by the writer, are the CVKS of overcrowding of houses and 
 congestion of premises. Legislative restriction has not been placed upon the 
 construction of houses for rental purposes, and it is no infringement of statutory 
 law to build three structures for the occupancy of tenants upon a plat of ground 
 that provides an area scarcely large enough for the purposes of one. There is 
 either a fascinating lure about speculation in the poorer character of rental 
 property, or so vast a risk of investment that it becomes the part of self-protection 
 to wring the last copper of revenue from the outlay by minimizing the cost and 
 augmenting to unreasonable proportions the unit of compensation, together with 
 a corresponding advance in the rate of interest that is exacted. The result of this 
 has been to fill certain sections of Texas cities with lateral tenement houses, 
 differing from the tenements of New York, as it has been previously remarked,, 
 only in size and undue expansion horizontally instead of vertically. Then, to 
 meet the high rental values placed upon the property at his use, the tenant 'has 
 formed the practice of augmenting his revenue by boarding and lodging outsiders. 
 The smallness of the .house, in the first instance, and the usual largeness of the 
 tenant's family, together with this enforced acceptance within the home of 
 outsiders and strangers, bring about the crowded condition of living apartments 
 that are revealed in the enormity of their offense' against health, propriety and 
 decency only by an actual and painstaking census from house to house. These 
 conditions are common to virtually all the conspicuous cities of Texas and as 
 surely as they are permitted to continue ungoverned by exacting regulations just 
 as surely will they augment in the intensity of their attending degradation. 
 
 Necessarily associated with the foregoing conditions are the housing evils 
 of poor venti'ation and insufficient light. Privacy among the homes of the 
 unskilled working people is an enjoyment for the most part unknown. Their 
 home life is subjected to the constant scrutiny of their neighbors and sooner ,vr 
 later, social workers declare, begins to show the injurious effects upon its 
 standards of this erosive influence. And there are no apparent indications of 
 substantial abatement of conditions of this kind. Housing enterprises for the 
 use of the humbler laborers are being projected throughout the State with no 
 noticeable deviation from principles that have dominated them in the pa-t. 
 Houses are being crowded upon lots too closely for proper sanitation. Insufficient 
 attention is devoted to their construction for the purpose of insuring adequate 
 light and ventilation. No thought, apparently, is given to a postulate fundamental 
 in scientific consideration of proper racial development careful attention to the 
 growing child who evolves from the innocent weakling of today into the citizen 
 of tomorrow, still weak and ignorant, or sound and vigorous, as his training and 
 opportunity may have caused. And seldom, if ever, are the finer sensibilities of 
 the human being considered as worthy elements in the social fabric, for there are 
 few apparent efforts made to aid their wholesome development or to preserve 
 them in their pristine virtue. 
 
 CITIES, THEMSELVES, ARE NEGLIGENT. 
 
 Moreover, it has been found that a common criticism of the cities of Texas 
 is their negligence of duties upon the fulfillment of which good housing depends 
 for its very life. In the absence of State housing laws or municipal ordinances 
 to restrict construction and to limit occupancy, the only safeguard against evil 
 conditions within the homes of the poorer working people and their surroundings 
 is the city's faithful and indiscriminate enforcement of its sanitary code. Where 
 city ordinance prohibits surface outhouses within a given distance of sewer mains, 
 and where closets of the kind are permitted in territory supplied with sewers, the 
 city, itself, is responsible for whatever evil conditions of housing arise from 
 such disobedience to its mandates. And yet it is a very, very frequent com- 
 plaint in Texas that municipal authorities do not enforce the provisions of such 
 ordinances. Again, the cities, themselves, are frequently responsible for a multi- 
 plicity of surface closets because of the inadequacy of their sewer systems. Un- 
 less the sewers fully cover the territory of the town, there must be some surface 
 outhouses and there must be some areas exposed to the contamination of tlieir 
 effluent contagions. Experience has taught that one of the most important con- 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 89 
 
 siderations of a system of good housing is a system of good sewerage. Good 
 housing rarely prevails over wide territories, however well provided with other 
 means of attainment, without this necessary complement of its equipment. The 
 extension of sewers to all parts of the incorporated area becomes, therefore, one 
 of the first considerations of a municipality that has determined to better its 
 standards of housing. 
 
 In the compliance with health codes, the cities themselves are frequently lax. 
 Proper attention is not always bestowed upon the disposal of garbage. There 
 must be some adequate means of removing and destroying the refuse of the house 
 in order to preserve proper standards of sanitation. When this is not done under 
 the supervision of the city, the carelessness and negligence of the tenant, together 
 with the city's indisposition to awaken him to his duty, not infrequently make 
 of advisory laws nothing more than a mockery. Inspection of premises is not 
 sufficiently rigorous. Discretionary powers invested in officials are sometimes 
 retardents upon the enforcement of the law. Then, too, the juries the people 
 are frequently prone to deem a law that compels one to clean up his premises 
 as a sort of infringement upon the inalienable rights of American citizenship. In- 
 attention to drainage, absence of provisions for the fumigation 01 vacant houses, 
 and many similar things that should be done immediately and that are vital 
 to good housing, yet which are neglected, conspire to complicate the problem 
 wherever it prevails in Texas. And all this reveals the real source of the trouble 
 the indifference of the public. 
 
 In its general form, as it appears in Texas and as it doubtless appears else- 
 where, the housing problem is in respect of many things threefold. Primarily 
 it concerns the past, the present and the future. Lawrence Veiller writes that 
 housing reform should be directed first "toward preventing the erection of build- 
 ings that are unsuitable for people to live in." Then, the proper maintenance of 
 existing houses must be enforced, and, finally, the errors of the past must be 
 corrected. Moreover, it must be considered and solved from three angles the 
 sanitary, the structural, the social. It also must be considered and solved from 
 the point of view of the tenant, the landlord and the public, and the welfare of 
 any of these must not be ignored. And finally it must be considered and solved 
 from the viewpoint of existing conditions, the laws, and their administration. 
 It will be the effort of final chapters of this discussion to present an explanation 
 of established means of attaining the desired solution! 
 
 HOUSING CAMPAIGN SHOULD START 
 
 WITH THOROUGH SURVEY OF CITY 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 16.) 
 
 After protracted study of systems of treatment that have been evolved in the 
 United States for the improvement of undesirable conditions of housing, couoled 
 with a consistent effort to harmonize, in so far as he could, the essential 
 differences of application growing out of distinct variations in climate, race and 
 local conditions, the writer is persuaded to follow closely the constructive work 
 of Mr. Lawrence Veiller of New York in the preparation of a suggestive program 
 of housing reform adaptable to cities of Texas. Mr. Veiller is recognized as one 
 of the foremost social workers of America, and he has made a life-long study of 
 the housing problem in its multifarious phases. His first intimate knowledge of 
 how the other half lives was acquired as a settlement worker in New York City, 
 and it .has augmented and developed through years of consistent service in 
 broader fields. He served as secretary and virtually directed the work of the 
 tenement house committee of the New York Charity Organization Society when 
 it was organized in 1898. As secretary of the New York State Tenement House 
 Commission in 1900 he assisted in the drafting of the present tenement house law 
 for cities of the first class, which created the tenement house department of the 
 City of New York. For two years thereafter he served as first deputy tenement 
 Commissioner and helped to give the law its first enforcement. At present Mr. 
 Veil T er is secretary and director of the National Housing Association and is 
 virtually the head'of the housing movement in the United States. 
 
po THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 Mr. Veiller takes the position that the failure "to remedy bad housing con- 
 ditions in many communities has been due not so much to lack of- understanding 
 of the conditions themselves, as to lack of knowledge of the best method of 
 remedying them." It is the writer's belief that cities ot Texas are not among this 
 class. Every indication suggestive of cause that has come under his observation 
 during several months of investigation leads to the conclusion that the presence 
 of housing troubles in Texas cities is due to the ignorance of the people 
 concerning prevalent conditions. At the outset, it was ascertained that a very 
 few citizens of Dallas, other than social workers, knew of w.hat consisted the 
 city's housing problem. The same ignorance was revealed in San Antonio, in 
 Houston and elsewhere. As a general thing the public has been unconscious of 
 the life of the other half and it has exhibited certain amazement when it has 
 observed for itself just what conditions actually surrounded it. 
 
 FACTS SHOULD COME FIRST. 
 
 Consequently, it should appear to every community that desires improvement 
 of housing conditions that the first thing to do is the ascertainment of facts. 
 Lay bare the city, analyze its social conditions coldly and honestly and then from 
 general principles that are applicable everywhere and special regulations to meet 
 peculiar local conditions, formulate a program of reform that will tend to 
 obliterate the evil and install the good. To attain this end a careful, painstaking 
 survey of the city is necessary; and it should be performed by a committee of 
 citizens possessing public confidence and representative of the highest intelligence, 
 skill and integrity of their several professions or trades. Upon appointment and 
 the commencement of its work, the functions of this committee become dual. 
 It* will launch the campaign of reform and must remain with it throughout its 
 progress. Therefore it devolve? upon it not only to ascertain the essential facts 
 of the situation and to formulate remedies for reprehensible conditions, but also 
 to assume the tnsk ^ c educating the community with respect to its discoveries 
 and to the methods available for the improvement of conditions of social 
 degradation. Mr. Veiller says of such a committee that it must of necessity be 
 "a body sufficiently wise to prosecute its inquiry and urge its reform in a 
 practical and a sane way, and also one that will command public confidence." 
 
 Continuing with reference to the formation of a committee to survey the city, 
 Mr. Veiller writes that inasmuch as the questions with which it will have to deal 
 will be those of building construction, architectural planning, fire protection, 
 sanitation and modern social problems, the committee should preferably be com- 
 posed of leading representatives of the professions actively dealing with such 
 problems. Therefore and the wisdom of the suggestion immediately asserts 
 itself it should have among its members if possible a practical architect, a high- 
 class builder, a sanitary engineer or experienced plumber, a responsible member 
 of the fire department, the superintendent of public buildings or an officer 
 discharging similar duties, a physician, a lawyer, a real estate man, a social worker 
 and such other citizens of representative type who would be interested in the 
 movement both from a humanitarian consideration and a motive of laudable 
 self-interest. 
 
 It is immediately obvious that the selection of this committee should be n. 
 matter of care and thought. Its membership must be harmonious and it must 
 have a capable executive as its chairman some one who understands the function 
 of directing, who is fitted for the quick adjustment of petty differences that 
 sometimes intrude themselves into a deliberative body to the defeat of its ends, 
 and who has large powers of discretion, tact, initiation and aggressiveness. "No 
 variety of professional experience," says Mr. Veiller, discussing the necessity for 
 an efficient and homogeneous committee," should outweigh this essential e 1 ement. 
 * * * Every movement for housing reform is a battle. Most, of them are 
 protracted war s extending over many years. The leader of the campaign must 
 .have many of the qualities of a good general. Strategy must not be unknown to 
 him. Vitally important is to get the point of view of the various interests involved 
 in bad housing conditions. There must be breadth of view, fair-mindedness and 
 tolerance of the rights of others, of the owners as well as of the tenants, if a 
 successful outcome is to be had from such a movement. There can be 
 
 no successful legislation based upon impressions. Reforms not based upon fully 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 91 
 
 ascertained facts will be found to have no permanent value. You will but enact 
 a law one year to have it repealed the next. The breastworks which defend the 
 law are made of the materials dug out in the investigation." 
 
 KEEP PUBLIC INTERESTED IN WORK. 
 
 The proper housing investigation must concern itself with causes and 
 tendencies, inasmuch as it seeks to work to practical ends. Moreover, it should 
 have definitely in mind the formulation of measures intended to better conditions. 
 There can be no reform if the campaign be allowed to stop with the ascertainment 
 and publication of a mass of discouraging, heart-rending facts. Once aroused by 
 information the public is ready to lend its assistance to the correction of evils, 
 but the public has a deep-seated forgetfulness that makes the sensation of today 
 seem trivial when remembered tomorrow. Therefore, with its official report in 
 hand the committee should have the basis of a scheme of improvement ready to 
 be suggested for the public's consideration, and when that 'shall have been 
 projected there must be continued effort on its part to keep the interest of the 
 people alive to the crying need of reform. While it is undoubtedly true that bad 
 housing conditions have arisen in Texas largely because the public has not been 
 aware of what was going on around it, it is equally certain that the disposition of 
 the public to forget and to lose interest after it has once been enlightened, by 
 heroic efforts if by no other means, must be prevented from defeating the end 
 in view. When -the crusade is once undertaken it means a hard, dogged fight until 
 Concrete results shall justify a cessation of especial effort. 
 
 Mr. Veiller's long experience convinces him that no part of a housing 
 investigation is of more importance than the formulation of the schedules to be 
 used in the inquiry. A month or more, he says, may well be taken in the 
 preparation of these schedules, especially where the investigators have had little 
 previous knowledge of the task they have assumed. The schedules should be in 
 the form of cards so that they may be easi^ filed, and the size suggested is a length 
 of eight inches and a width of five. The points expected to be covered should be 
 printed upon the card so the investigator may be required only to check the facts 
 against their proper classifications. And a system should be devised to eliminate 
 the confusion -attending differences in judgment of different persons respecting 
 the conditions upon which they are required to report. The schedule should be 
 made complete, not only as to general principles of housing, but also as to local 
 peculiarities which must be in a measure understood and considered in advance of 
 the investigation by social workers who have previously gone over the ground. 
 
 The facts ascertained and analyzed, the report made and given wide publicity, 
 the next duty of the committee is to keep up its campaign of education with 
 persistence. It will doubtless require long hammering to bring an evidence of 
 yielding, but when it does come the results obtained will in all probability be of 
 sufficient merit and magnitude to compensate for the long siege of discouraging 
 effort. 
 
 PRINCIPLES OF A HOUSING LAW 
 
 SUGGESTED FOR TEXAS CITIES 
 
 (From Issue of Dec. 17.) 
 
 The preparation of a housing code is a work that calls for care and delib- 
 eration. The law becomes its own guaranty of life or its own condemnation by 
 virtue of the success it meets in pursuing its purpose. It therefore must not only 
 be drawn to stand the test of the courts, but it must fulfill its practical functions 
 to the satisfaction of public opinion. Assailed by vigorous opponents from the. 
 time of its pendency in the Council or Legislature a certain fate it must meet 
 and overcome the influence of its own works must be the chief reliance of its 
 proponents and defenders in the breaking down of stubborn and powerful oppo- 
 sition that may mean eventually its nullification or repeal. 
 
 At the outset it should be understood that the enactment of a housing law 
 will have as an early effect the apparent curtailment of revenue from rental prop- 
 erties. Of course, there are innumerable advantages growing out of the rigid 
 enforcement of such a statute that may be said fully to compensate indirectly at 
 
92 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 least the attending loss in rentals and expenditures for improvements, but these 
 advantages accrue to the community more rapidly than to the landlord, who is 
 not easily convinced that in the long run the proper modes of living he assists 
 his tenants to follow will return to him directly as well as to the community the 
 substantial income he believes his investment entitles him to. When the law pro 
 hibits a house to occupy more than a stated percentage of the lot, the traffic in 
 small, closely-crowded huts and shanties is stopped and revenue is proportion- 
 ately reduced. When the law forbids ihe occupancy of a room by more people 
 than it will provide the proper proportion of fresh air for, the business o f the 
 cheap tenement will be sadly interfered with in so far as are concerned the large 
 revenues extorted from hapless creatures who are compelled by greed or circum- 
 stance to sleep in rooms after the fashion of sardines in a box. These things 
 and their like may be expected to create decided and powerful opposition to any 
 legislative movement that contemplates radical changes. 
 
 It is the certainty of stubborn opposition that makes it expedient, therefore, 
 to impose the more rigid restrictions upon the work of the future, rather 
 than to undertake radical changes in conditions that are already prevalent where 
 their consummation is sure to entail considerable loss to property owners. The 
 process of attaining good housing is more the work of evolution than of revolu- 
 tion. It is simpler to build up good housing conditions by preventing the oc- 
 currence of obstacles to that end, than it is to eliminate evil conditions that 
 already exist. The work of elimination is a very gradual thing usually, where- 
 as the work of intelligent construction and arrangement of all parts of the 
 growing city may proceed with marked rapidity. It is this phase of the 
 problem that makes endeavor toward the attainment of ideal conditions in the 
 future of paramount importance in designing a housing campaign with its 
 necessary complement of legislation. 
 
 KEEP IT A CITY OF HOMES. 
 
 In providing for the future it should be the effort of all cities where tene- 
 ment houses are of inconsiderable number, to fix upon the existing number as a 
 minimum and by a process of education and legislation gradually reduce that 
 minimum to the vanishing point. Housing experts throughout the world in- 
 veigh against the tenement house. "Don't let your city become a city of tene- 
 ments; keep it a city of homes" is among the first admonitions to cities seeking 
 aid and information in working out a proper housing scheme. This may be ac- 
 complished by encouraging the construction of detached houses for the occu- 
 pancy of working people and by discouraging, through education and restrictive 
 regulations, the erection of tenements. 
 
 It is taken for granted that none of the cities of Texas desires to become a 
 tenement city. All have as the basis of their present housing schemes the de- 
 tached house, although there are many instances of comparatively small struc- 
 tures, themselves, being converted into institutions that meet the accepted defi- 
 nition of a tenement house as it is recognized by law in the United States. Wher- 
 ever a city may have its choice as between tenements and individual homes it 
 selects the latter, the former presenting in their most aggravated forms the stub- 
 born evils of bad housing. There is, therefore, little use in Texas for a tenement 
 house law. A general housing statute will serve eventually to correct what tene- 
 ment house troubles now prevail and stop their further development. 
 
 That the law to assist the development and continuance of good housing 
 conditions should be of State enactment is a question that conditions must largely 
 determine. Such a measure would accomplish at once throughout the entire 
 State that which it would doubtless require the several cities a long time to do, 
 and yet its effect might not prove as satisfactory as the effect of local ordi- 
 nances because of greater difficulties in the way of its enforcement. Upon the 
 law's enforcement everything will depend. Housing evils can not be eradicated by 
 the enactment of any measure, be it local or State-wide in scope. They will 
 succumb only to the constant, unrelenting enforcement of the law's provisions. 
 It might be, therefore, that the influence of public sentiment would operate more 
 potently toward the enforcement of a local law than toward the execution of a 
 Statewide measure. However, selection becomes a matter needing the most 
 
THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 93 
 
 careful consideration, and should not be made before the judgment of many 
 expert minds shall have been procured. 
 
 The extent to which a housing law may be carried will become in Texas, 
 perhaps, something of a problem. It will in all probability be it State law or 
 city ordinance encounter frequent challenges upon constitutional grounds. 
 It will remain for the legal advisers to keep the measure clear of constitu- 
 tional shoals. Should they succeed, widespread and satisfying results may be 
 accomplished under the operation of the law; should they fail, other means of 
 acquiring a permanency of proper, wholesome development must be found. 
 
 If provision can not be made for the consummation of desired ends by 
 private enterprise under public supervision, it may become necessary eventually 
 to charge the State, the municipality, itself, with that responsibility. It may be, 
 perhaps, a far cry from present political conditions to a public-owned and pub- 
 lic-controlled scheme of housing, yet the fact remains that the conspicuous ex- 
 
 "EXAMPLE OF CIVIC ATTRACTIVENESS." 
 
 amples of the most successful crusades against old and hardened slums have not 
 only been waged by municipalities themselves, but the pretty, comfortable and 
 healthful residence areas into which the former denizens of the slums were 
 moved, have been designed and maintained under public control. The King's 
 Highway of London was once a slum district. It is now one of the most mag- 
 nificent boulevards of the world. The people who used to dwell amid the squalor 
 of the old slum territory now reside in neat brick cottages erected by the Lon- 
 don County Council from the profits accruing from the acquisition and subse- 
 quent improvements of the old slum district. The city of Berlin is a city without 
 a slum area, and yet more than twenty-five years ago the slum was the bane 
 of its municipal life. At that period it had less than 1,000,000 inhabitants; today 
 it has more than 3,000,000, and is rated as the cleanest city in the world. It 
 took over the control of its housing and solved its problem in all the phases of 
 congestion, overcrowding, vice and squalor, solely by municipal effort, and not 
 through the philanthropy, the charity nor the benevolent business of individuals. 
 
 HAS A GRASP ON TEXAS. 
 
 The housing problem is getting a hold on Texas cities. Unless measures 
 are taken immediately to solve it satisfactorily, or at least to make the beginning 
 
94 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 of solution, it will become more complicated and intricate with the passage of 
 the years. The field of private philanthropic enterprise is open and may b 
 cultivated to fruitful advantage. The spirit of "philanthropy and 5 per cent" 
 becomes a potent social force when properly-directed, but it can not, ot course, 
 be coerced. Model homes erected by private philanthropy that expects only a 
 reasonable return upon its investment assist materially in trie required readjust- 
 ment. But they may be erected only when the spirit prompts the philanthropist. 
 Adequate laws governing the construction of future houses, if properly en- 
 forced, may become the final solvent of the trouble, and should be liberally 
 drawn upon wherever there is a sincere desire to bring about improved conditions 
 of living. Their potentiality may be substantially augmented by the co-oper- 
 ation of private philanthropy. And at present these two means seem all that 
 are immediately available. That fact urges more forcibly upon the student of 
 such conditions that in the event of their failure the last resort must be the com- 
 munity itself. There is but one thing inevitable: Conditions can not continue to 
 be as they are without serious detriment to the^social body. They must be reme- 
 died. Who knows that it will not come about in this country, as it has come 
 in Europe's most enlightened nations, that the privileges, prerogatives and pow- 
 ers of the municipality itself may have to be enlarged and broadened to permit 
 of community ownership of and community dealing in the housing business? 
 If it comes it will be as the dernier resort after all other means shall have failed. 
 And, again, if it come, it will doubtless solve the problem. 
 
 Reverting to the subject of a housing- law, the principal thing to accom- 
 plish, it has been previously shown, is to direct aright the channel of develop- 
 ment by preventing further degradation and expansion of evil conditions of 
 housing. The law must insist that all buildings constructed in the future shall 
 comply with its. provisions. In the first place, if possible, it should limit the 
 area of the building lot which the house may occupy the surest means of pre- 
 venting congestion of premises and of creating adequate facilities for light and 
 ventilation. The height of the house should be regulated, and imperative pro- 
 visions made for yards and courts. Rear tenements, if possible, should be for- 
 bidden by law, and if it be found that this procedure is inhibited by constitu- 
 tional restrictions, their construction should be regulated by rigid rules intended 
 to assist the execution against them of the stern provisions of the sanitary 
 code. Dark rooms should be forbidden by insisting upon windows that open 
 upon a street or yard> and in so far as it may be legally practicable, the size 
 of the rooms should not be allowed to fall below a fixed minimum of cubic 
 space. Access to living rooms and bed rooms should be had without passage 
 through another bed room, thereby insuring the privacy that is essential to 
 wholesome home life. 
 
 Under the head of sanitation there should be far-reaching restrictions im- 
 posed upon the new building. Living rooms in cellars should not be tolerated. 
 Walls and floors below the ground level should be damp-proof and water-proof. 
 There should be in every house a proper sink with running water, where public 
 mains are reasonably accessible, and also where public of private sewers are rea- 
 sonably accessible every house should have within it a water closet. Provisions 
 should be made to effect careful plumbing. The bathtub is so generally consid- 
 ered more of a convenience than a necessity that it would probably be difficult 
 to insist upon the construction of every house in the future with bathroom 
 equipment. If a way could be found, however, to bring this about, a long-felt 
 want among the poor would be satisfied. 
 
 Alterations of houses should also b,e controlled by the law, similar provi- 
 sions applying to such work as would apply to the construction of new buildings. 
 
 When alterations are made the work is for the future. 
 
 MAINTENANCE OF HOUSES NOW BUILT. 
 
 Dealing with the present, that is, the maintenance of houses already 
 erected, there should be strict regulations of the law to insure wholesome modes 
 of living. Every dwelling house should at all times be supplied with water 
 in sufficient quantity, either within the house or on the lot, and within twelve 
 

 
96 THE HOUSING PROBLEM OF TEXAS. 
 
 or fifteen feet of the house. If the city mains are reasonably accessible, the law 
 should insist that each house have its own water tap. The occupant or tenant 
 of every dwelling house should be required by the law to k< >p the house and 
 premises free of accumulations of dirt, filth, garbage or oth refuse matters, 
 and should be compelled to clean the premises whenever ordered by the health 
 authorities to do so. Wall paper should never be placed upon the walls or 
 ceiling until the ol'd paper shall have been removed and the walls or ceiling 
 thoroughly cleaned. The tenant should be required to provide himself with a 
 regulation garbage can. and the city should take charge of the disposal of its 
 contents. If a room in a dwelling is found to be overcrowded, the Health De- 
 partment should be authorized to order the number of persons sleeping or living 
 therein to be so reduced that there shall not be less than 600 cubic feet of air to 
 each adult and 400 cubic feet of air to each child under 12 years of age. The 
 law should also provide that when ver a dwelling house or any part of it is 
 infected with contagious disease, or is unfit for human habitation, or dangerous 
 to life or health by reason of want of repair, or of defects in drainage, plumbing, 
 ventilation or construction, or by reason of existence on the premises of nuis- 
 ances likely to cause sickness among the occupants, the Health Department may 
 issue an order requiring the occupants to vacate the house. Authority should 
 also be vested in the Health Board to compel the repair of buildings unfit, by 
 reason of deterioration, for human habitation. With respect to large room- 
 ing houses, provisions for fire escapes should be made. 
 
 The law should also compel certain improvements in dwellings erected 
 prior to its passage, although it will probably be found that it can not be quite 
 as restrictive in this instance as it may be feasible to be with regard to dwellings 
 of future construction. It should compel the cutting of windows in all dark- 
 rooms and faulty ventilation should be remedied. In all houses erected prior to 
 the passage of the law, where connection with the sewer is possible, surface 
 closets should be abandoned and sanitary closets installed. Repairs necessary 
 to make ramshackle houses habitable should be insisted upon. The provisions 
 of the law should be inflexible in respect to these things, so that old conditions 
 may be put -in immediate line of improvement. 
 
 Plans of proposed buildings should be filed with the appropriate official 
 and. should not be permitted to be used until they shall have received his ap- 
 proval. The same procedure should control the alteration of existing buildings. 
 And before occupancy may be legally permitted it should be the duty of the 
 Health Department to inspect the house and issue a certificate setting forth the 
 fact of its compliance with the sanitary and housing codes, in its construction 
 and equipment. Penalties should attach to violation of this provision sufficient 
 to insure its obedience. Owners and agents of all dwelling houses should be 
 required to file with the Plealth Department a list of their holdings. Penalties 
 for violations of any provision of the code should be made reasonably severe. 
 And the enforcement of the code should be placed under the jurisdiction of the 
 Health Department. 
 
 Many of the foregoing ideas are largely the substance of the model law 
 written by Mr. Lawrence Veiller of New York as the framework for such leg- 
 islation throughout the cities of the United States. This law was the working 
 basis for the housing ordinance passed last year by the city of Columbus (Ohio), 
 which also has been drawn upon for suggestions serviceable in the preparation 
 of a skeleton for a Texas law or an ordinance for Texas cities. The law has 
 stood the tests of the court upon most of its provisions, and it is widely favored 
 as i rneans toward bringing about those reformations that are believed to be so 
 essential to the proper development of American cities. 
 
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