Letters to the Editor
NEW YORK'S HOUSING PROBLEM [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—It is sometimes useful to consider how other countries are faeing problems that are giving us cause for serious anxiety.- The history of New York's efforts to grapple with their housing problem is of special interest to England at this time, and Mr. Lawrence Veiller, the Secretary of the National Housing Association of the United Kingdom, has kindly given me some reliable data on this question.
He states that nearly every method of relief associated with housing reform the world over has been employed in New York. Since 1855 model tenements have been built by companies with limited dividends. Since 1867 there have been numerous regulations to control multiple dwellings. The Octavia Hill system, by which old houses are properly managed and are gradually improved, has been extensively tried.
The City has established a separate branch, known as the Tenement House Department, charged with the sole duty -of looking after housing. Over 24,000,000 has been spent over a period of twenty-five years by this department which to-day has a staff of over five hundred. A special legal tribunal, sitting one day a week, has been set up in order to hear housing cases which need specialized knowledge. New housing has been subsidized for a limited term of years through tax exemption of buildings. Hundreds of houses have been demolished under slum clearance schemes, and the sites used for recreation grounds. All these efforts have resulted in reduced death rates and tuberculosis rates. For example, the death rate in New York has been reduced from 1990 in the -thousand in 1901 to 11.80 in the thousand in 1927 An even more striking decrease is shown in the tuberculosis death rate,' which in the same period has fallen from 264 to •*86.
In spite of all these efforts one-third of the population in New York still live under unsatisfactory conditions, mainly In rooms that are not adequately ventilated and with little privacy, sharing the water supply with other families.
Many instances are given by Mr. Veiller of buildings that are so high that they are cut off from light and air. One tall building in New York, at noon, casts a shadow one-sixth of a mile in extent. He also points out that in apartment houses fifteen or more storeys high the dangers of fire are very serious. In short, New York is becoming a sunless city inhabited by cliff dwellers, and many rooms never receive the direct rays of the sun at any hour of the day or at any season of the year. Mr. Veiller praises England for adopting as her standard for post-War housing a maximum of twelve families or about sixty to the acre, and asserts that in New York instances can be found of people living three and four thousand persons to the acre.
On this particular point Mr. Veiller, who has had wide experience of housing conditions in Europe as well as in America, criticizes the latest proposals of the London County Council to build flats nine storeys high at Ossulston Street, in St. Pancras. He says," We very much fear that America has much to, answer for in this latest experiment of the London County Council. For the scheme to go up into the air and build flats nine storeys high was evolved by the chief architect of the L.C.C., Mr. G. Topham Forrest, shortly after his return from America, and his study of building conditions over there. . . . We predict that these nine-storey flats will not prove to be a success, and that no similar group of buildings, or anything like their type, will be built in future in London."
Mr. Veiller is very complimentary to Mr. Chamberlain's success in encouraging private enterprise, and wooing it back into the housing field. But he says that Americans expect that in the near future Mr. Chamberlain-will provide a programme for dealing with England's slums, and he hopes that one of the methods adopted will be the reconditioning of existing houses, as it "is a method which has proved Practicable- in every country where it has been employed, and one that does not involve the impossible financial burden
upon the people which the complete wiping out of acres of existing buildings and their replacement by new buildings does involve."—! am, Sir, &c.,
53 Netherhall Gardens, N.W. 3.
B. S. TOWNROE.
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