HOUSE PROPERTY AND ITS MANAGEMENT.* IT is nearly sixty years
since Miss Octavia Hill began, with Ruskin's help, to demonstrate her great principle that housing reform is partly a question of management. She bought three wretched houses in a slum, had them thoroughly. cleaned, and gradually introduced improvements. She herself collected the rents and insisted that they should be punctually paid. She set aside a definite sum for repairs each quarter ; if there was any surplus, it was spent on such new fittings as the tenants desired, so that they had a direct incentive to take care of the property. Miss Hill took a keen personal interest in the welfare of her tenants, but she tried to make them help themselves and regarded the charitable dole as immoral and disastrous in its effect upon character. She soon found that her method was sound. She earned a clear 5 per cent. on her capital and she transformed the slum houses and their occupants. Miss Hill was encouraged to extend her experiments and to train women to help her, and her success was fully recognized when in 1902-3 the Ecclesiastical Commissioners entrusted to her the control of two large properties with hundreds of poor dwellings in South London. Her example has been followed in Phila- delphia, in Amsterdam and elsewhere, but nowhere has it been more fruitful than in our own. country.
• House Property and its Management : Some Papers on the Methods of Manage' meat introduced by Mist °Maya: Hill and adapted to Modern Conditions. London :
G. Mien and Unwin. [3s. ed. net.] • - " • - " '
A little volume of Miss Octavia Hill's writings, with some ether. papers, has just been published under the care of Miss Bf. M. Jeffery and Miss Edith Neville, with a preface by Dr, Gibbon, of the Ministry of Health. A copy of it ought to be in the hands of every member of every Housing Committee throughout the land, for it is both opportune and valuable. The building of new houses is not in itself a solution of the housing Problem ; unless the new houses are rightly managed they may, and often do, degenerate into slums. Those who know the outer suburbs of London, especially in the north-east, are painfully aware of the results of the compulsory migration of slum-dwellers from condemned areas in Inner London to new and healthier surroundings. Where these people have not been properly controlled they have simply created fresh slums, more sordid and more disheartening than their old haunts. The same fate often overtakes the " model dwelling." Miss Octavia Hill dis- covered a generation ago that the " model dwelling " might be a veritable hotbed of vice and degradation unless it was strictly supervised, that respectable tenants were demoralized and the weak and unsteady people encouraged in their evil ways. She found the remedy in skilled management, preferably by a trained and tactful woman who was given full authority to select tenants and to decide about small repairs, as well as to collect the rent. She believed in enlisting the co-operation of the tenants, wherever that was possible, in promoting their common welfare, but she held that the owners' agent must say the last word.
" Those who know the life of the poor know—those who watch the effect of letting to a given family .a set of rooms in a block in a rough neighbourhood, or rooms in a small house in the same district, know—those who remember how numerous are the kinds of people to whom they must refuse rooms in a block for their own sake, or that of others, know. To the noisy drunkard one must say, ' For the quiet people's sake, No ' ; to the weak drunkard one must say, ' You would get led away, No '; to the young widow with children one must say, Would not you be better in a small house where the resident landlady would see a little to the children ' ? thinking in one's heart also, ' and to you.' For the orphaned factory girl who would like to keep mother's home together ' one feels a less public life safer ; for the quiet family who care to bring up their children well one fears the bad language and gambling on the stairs. For the strong and self-contained and self-reliant it may be all right, but the instinct of the others who cling on to the smaller houses is right for them."
We are glad to learn from this book that the Office of Woods and Forests has recently adopted Miss Octavia Hill's method for a Crown estate east of Regent's Park, the leases of which have fatten in. Miss Jeffery, an experienced manager of house pro- perty, who was trained on Miss Hill's system, has been placed in control of the estate, which includes many tenement houses round Cumberland Basin.
" Rebuilding is hardly to be thought of for the moment. The immediate need is to make the existing houses reasonably fit for habitation. Most of them are dilapidated and some of them are filthy. Backyards have been built over, and in some instances another cottage has been put up, the only entrance to which is through the house which faces the street. The property has been for the most part badly neglected during the later years of the leases, while in the earlier years little care was exercised to see that the conditions of the lease were not departed from. Miss Jeffery has opened a small office on the estate, as a centre from which the rents of the houses are col- lected week by week. On their visits the women managers find out what repairs are needed to make the houses habitable and clean, and supervise the repairs already in hand. Miss Jeffery and her assistants are thus in constant touch with the tenants, helping them in many ways and inducing them to do their part in improving their surroundings. While insisting that necessary alterations and cleansing must be carried out forthwith, the managers do their best to study the comfort and convenience of the tenants as far as possible. If the tenants must be removed for a time, temporary accommodation is found for them. It is intended that the number of licensed houses on the estate shall be reduced as the leases fall in, and the managers are taking steps to ensure improved management, on Public-house Trust lines, of those that will remain."
The work began in the summer of 1919, and one of the first acts of the new manager was to encourage the formation of a tenants' association, which would help her and the department in recon- structing the area with the least possible amount of friction or inconvenience. In Amsterdam, as another paper shows, the work of the chief woman manager and her staff, who look after the 4,000 municipal houses, has been astonishingly successful. In that city no tenant is rejected because he has a bad character, but the drunken and dissolute families are housed in suburban areas under the close supervision of a resident woman manager who tries to reclaim them. While there is no reason why capable and broad-minded men should not manage working-class house property, as indeed many of them do with success, we are bound to say that such work seems specially suited to women who have the necessary qualifications. A committee of the women's section of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association inquired into the matter last year and declared, not without reason, that " there are special requirements on certain properties which at the moment urgently call for women's special experience." They pointed out that a woman manager is able to give the housewife, suddenly transferred from an old house to a new house, the practical advice as to the use of stoves and fittings which she needs, and for lack of which she may ruin expensive appliances
in a few weeks. The workman's wife usually pays the rent and . • has to deal with the landlord's agent, so that it is just as well),
if the agent is of the same sex. The committee pointed out that Birmingham had appointed a "woman rent collector and super-' visor of houses," and it urged that other local authorities should appoint women officials in their housing departments. But all the women and men employed in this responsible and difficult work must be properly trained and they must have the right temperament, for the ideal house property manager is not merely the product of training.
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