Read Ebook: Good housing that pays by Waldo Fullerton L Fullerton Leonard Sargent John Singer Illustrator

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An important part of the collector's duty is to ascertain and report damage done to plumbing. The plumber also notifies the Association of any damage that is to be traced to the tenant, and the latter defrays part of the cost of repairs by instalments till the whole amount has been paid.

Careful calculation showed that in a group of 140 families, for one year, the cost of repairs for plumbing due to the tenants' carelessness was . The real estate officer of a large trust company declared this an excellent record.

As the rent-collector of tact and insight makes her rounds the mechanical transaction of requesting and receipting for the rent is accomplished frictionlessly and with dispatch in the great majority of instances. The services of the constable, at a cost of .00, to dispossess a family are rarely and very regretfully called into requisition. But the Association stands for no shillyshallying. It requires prompt payment. It insists that those who occupy its houses shall fulfil the few simple regulations it has established. It does not hesitate to invoke the arm of the law when the need arises, and the tenants soon become aware of the fact. Most of them, happy to be under a fair and considerate landlord, are punctual, peaceful and contented. "I'll never get another landlord like you," said an old Jew, compelled for reasons of his own to move, as he trudged dolefully away wagging his beard.

The cases in which the Association has to proceed to the extreme penalty of eviction may be similar to that of the woman who represented herself as a widow with four children. The children were mythical. She took in four male boarders, in flagrant defiance of the strict rule that forbids taking boarders or subletting without the Association's consent. There was nothing to do but to put her out, inexorably.

The rent-collector takes with her wherever she goes her moneybag, containing a small card-catalogue to check off payments, which are entered in the office ledgers, receipt-books, blank forms for leases, and paper for memoranda. Sometimes tenants who fail to have the sum ready when the call is made promise to bring it to the office, and rarely do they fail to keep their word. Italians are particularly punctilious in their payments. The man who after an absence of two months came back and paid up for the whole time, though there were a few days he was not, bound to pay for, saying proudly, "I am an honorable gentleman," was merely typical of his compatriots.

Ordinarily it is not the great crises of life and death that confront the sympathetic rent-collector. But she never can tell what will meet her round the corner. Here sits a man who was for years a baker, and he is utterly forlorn. His sister bustles cheerfully about the room, making as brave a pretence of keeping a home as she can with some sorry sticks of furniture and a few cracked dishes. The ailing brother has just come back from the hospital, and there is a package wrapped in a bit of Polish newspaper on the table before him. The rent-collector unwraps from it a brown bottle of medicine bearing the label of the Polish doctor to whom he had gone straight from the contrary hospital advice, to secure a nostrum for his heart-trouble. He insists that he never will return to that hospital which kept him in bed so long and did nothing for him. He will never be able to work again, he reiterates monotonously.

Those who have labored in France among soldiers blinded in war, to restore a hopeful mood in which a man takes hold on life again, know what means a wise, kind woman will use with a discouraged man who finds his cross too heavy to carry and has succumbed to a melancholy listlessness. She brings him round by degrees to a more rational frame of mind, and in place of the closed door she shows him an open window. Was not the result worth tarrying for, a few minutes? Even from the commercial point of view is anything gained by having tenants who are at odds with destiny, or anaemic, if not acutely ill, from bad air, bad smells, foul vaults and cellars, surface drainage and contaminated food? Was not Miss Hill entirely right when she declared that tenants and their surroundings must be improved together?

Here was another trouble to be adjusted by the patient universal arbiter. Italian children sat on Polish steps and refused to be dislodged. Out of a cloud no bigger than a child's uplifted hand came a storm that threatened to destroy the peace of the street. Five nations presently swept into the melee. No great matter, you say--but even so the world-war started.

Wagon drivers for the meat packers' distributing houses struck for a dollar a week more. A little butcher couldn't afford to let his chopping block stay idle. He borrowed a push-cart and a neighbor helped him and he fetched the meat himself, running the gauntlet of the angry teamsters. But that is the reason, if you please, that he hasn't the rent today. There is so often the slenderest margin between a sufficiency and dire distress in the case of the poor. To most of us a strike is in the newspapers. To them a strike is in their lives--it may come like a bolt of lightning crashing through the roof to disrupt a home.

Perhaps the reckless joy-rider or motor-truck driver will never know how many little children are kept within doors by their mothers for fear they will be run over if they play in the street. But the rent-collector knows. There are so many children shrieking and sprawling over the cobbles already that it doesn't seem as though there could be any left in any of the houses. But there are always plenty more. Here are some, too tiny to be allowed to go to the city swimming-baths. In the heat of summer they wear scarcely any clothes, and their puny limbs stick out from their tattered garments like twigs from a bird's nest. They sit here in the darkened room where their mother is sewing on trousers which she "finishes" at nine cents a pair. The mother explains that she doesn't dare let them go out into the street--they might get run over. So here they sit, listless, pale, forlorn. They laugh outright when you play a child's game on your fingers for them, and are loath to have you go.

In another house sits a fair-haired girl with blue eyes, one of them sadly atwist, and a scrofulous disfigurement marking what is almost a pretty face. She is perhaps fourteen years old. You start to talk to her and you find she is deaf and dumb. She has been at a school for such unfortunates, the rent-collector explains, and this is her summer vacation. It is certainly vacant enough.

Here are houses just about to be transferred to the Association. Italians, mostly, occupy them. Notice the English sparrow that flutters into a crevice of the bricks, where it wholly disappears as it finds its nest. There is the common phenomenon of one hydrant outside, for half-a-dozen families. In a dark angle of a yard, behind a woodshed cluttered and foul, there is a pool of stinking black water out of which you can fish rotten burlap and odds and ends of the social history of all the houses. The curious children have turned pale green, like sprouts in a cellar, and their arms are thin as pipestems. The stench that emanates from the pool seems to have something to do with it. The mother says--somewhat proudly--that a doctor has said that her children have sluggish livers. She looks at you with a furrowed brow as she wipes her hands in her apron. She is wondering whether there is any hope of anything better in the way you are looking at her. "The landlord," she says, not knowing of the change to another regime that is imminent, "never does nothin' to the place but just collect the rent."

A few years ago behind the rear wall of a large church there was a pocket that those who praised God on the other side of the wall knew nothing about. It adjoined a court of nine houses which the Octavia Hill Association had acquired and improved. Through the court the inmates of the four evil and invisible dwellings made their hasty escape to the street when the law was on the trail that the gospel never found. The owner was a well-to-do negro, who was content to take his money from an agent and ask no questions. The agent was appealed to, again and again, to put an end to the bedlam of drink and gambling, of fighting and obscenity that made night hideous on the premises. Providentially the owner died and the houses were bought by a friend of the Association who turned them over to its care. There was nothing to do but to evict the tenants. Polish immigrants of the poorest were put in. In the first year after the change the rent-collector was able to show every cent collected. In the second year the result was the same. In the meantime the Association received its usual 7 1/2 per cent. commission for collecting the rents and the owners received in the first year 6.4 per cent. and in the second year 6.5 per cent. on the investment.

Another striking object-lesson among many that might be cited as to the value of the quiet influence of the rent-collector--an influence that permeates as subtly as yeast--is to be seen in the group of houses for the negro population on Naudain Street near the offices of the Association, to which reference has already been made. One of these houses, since it is given over to single old women, has come to be called the "Old Ladies' Home." Would one find exemplary contentment let him talk with an old crippled, blind woman who lives on the top floor. "She is able to iron a shirt-waist without a wrinkle," says the friendly rent-collector. The order and the cleanliness of these rooms is remarkable. There are stories of the plantation-life to be heard at the lips of the old-time "Mammy" of Dixieland. There are the manners of the great houses that have become historic landmarks, and of the days before "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was written. The whole House of Bishops of the A. M. E. Church has to find room on the walls somewhere, and you will discover that devout communicants are on their knees every night for the younger generation who may fall a prey to the lures of the Devil along the Great Black Way of South Street.

As for the all-important role of the Superintendent, it is hard to see where his work begins or ends. There are just as many troubles as he will give ear to. Here is a Jewish woman who turns loose a flood of appeal and interrogation and never stops, when either the rent-collector or the superintendent comes in sight. All she wants is all there is to want; only a "blue sky" concession would satisfy her claims. But behind all this importunity is maternal ambition. A piano in the house, and the daughter's lessons, mean stinting for all the rest, as in the case of a home--not controlled by the Association--where a druggist's clerk lives and we find the kitchen range, the dinner-table and a Steinway baby-grand crowded together in one small room.

The Association has its own force of mechanics, for work old and new, and the superintendent is their "boss." They have a repair shop in the basement of the office at 613-15 Lombard Street for any work that is not to be done on the premises. There they keep supplies of small hardware, paint and lumber to be used as the call comes.

These mechanics attend to everything except the plumbing, the roof-repairs, and the larger operations that involve considerable plastering and brickwork. The plumbing is always as simple as it can be, and when it is once installed the maintenance chiefly means keeping the drains to the sinks and toilets in working order.

When houses are taken over for alteration, galvanized sinks with slate backs are put in, except that in the better houses one-piece enameled iron sinks are used. The water supply, run through galvanized pipe, issues at brass spigots. Not much lead pipe is used--it is tempting to thieves. The sink taps are iron.

One of the first things to do to an old house toward its rehabilitation is to scrape off the paper. The Association has no love of many thicknesses of paper concealing long neglect and the insidious lairs of insects, and it generally applies paint or calcimine instead. Ten or twelve coats of paper are common, and as many as twenty-seven have been removed from the walls of one room. When the walls are scraped the breaks in the plaster are likely to be alive with the vermin. The walls are painted or calcimined in light tones that make an agreeable contrast with the woodwork. Many tenants want paper, but they can be taught in time the sanitary advantage of the alternative.

The exterior brickwork, frequently buckling and crumbling, requires much attention, and often many feet of new wall must be built, or a wall entirely replaced. Broken doors and rotting window-frames and sashes are frequent items of expense. It is a mistake to renew glass in a sash too weak to hold it. A new sash is a truer economy in the long run than one that is patched up "to do."

It might look as though in the case of a wrecked window-blind or a worn-out washer for a spigot the tenant might display sufficient initiative to attend to the necessary repairs himself; but there are so many ways of doing things wrong and of damaging Association property that the Superintendent actually prefers to have the tenants let things alone till he and his own men can come.

A three story house at 1326 Kenilworth Street might be chosen as an apt example of the superintendent's reconstructive work. The rental of the house before the Association took charge was a month. It was sublet to negro tenants who paid in all about a month for their quarters.

It is now being rearranged for two-room apartments, one on each floor, which will rent for eight dollars a floor per month, the rent payable in weekly instalments. There is a toilet on each floor, and there is a sink in each kitchen. Superfluous partitions that prevented the free circulation of light and air have been taken out. A gesture of the superintendent's arms, as though he were lashing out in a gymnastic exercise, told one more than his words. "I must get light and air," he said; and one thought of Octavia Hill's insistence on this point.

One of a row of little houses in the rear is a month. The former owner put in a few cheap articles of furniture and collected a month. Under the Association the furniture is that of the tenants. Improvements now being installed will add a dollar a month to the rent. These little houses are called "one, two, three houses," because they are of three rooms only, one over another.

What an oasis we find here, as we look from the upper windows! The houses round about--not Association property--have ruinous shacks at the rear that hold broken boxes and barrels, superannuated chairs and bedding and broken-down baby carriages. There is no clear space to sit under a shade-tree, or plant morning-glories, or put a sandpile. One longs to see the workmen who are paving the Octavia Hill courtyard below turn their attention to the whole vicinity.

In the case of the property at 948-952 North Third Street, from six privy-wells in the court, which extended partly under the kitchens, one hundred barrels of filth in each case were taken. From another well, ten feet in diameter and twenty-five in depth, 275 barrels were taken. The figures convey some slight idea of the superintendent's task as sanitary engineer. The men, overcome by the stench of these vaults which had not been thoroughly cleaned--it is said--in eighty years, worked in relays to obtain the necessary breathing-spells.

There were disreputable tenants when the Association came to this court; tenants who had influence with powers political and defied the new administration to oust them. A law unto themselves, they made night both hideous and dangerous to respectable neighbors. The drinking, brawling, immoral occupants had to go, and today's tenants are a very different sort.

A Serb who inhabits one of the houses in the cement-paved court at the rear is secretary of his lodge, and describes with pride the school for thirty Serbian children which he and his countrymen have started at Third and Brown Streets near by. In another house a woman is making some embroidery to be sold for her church. She has been working on stems for artificial leaves to trim hats, and she has made .50 to .00 a week laboring from dawn to dark, at two cents and a half for a gross of stems. But she is happy because she has a good husband, and this is pin-money. The children of another house have taken a cast-iron bath-tub and made for themselves a joyous swimmingpool with a few feet of hose provided by their father. No wonder is it that former residents who recently returned to the court to visit failed to recognize the place, and were about to retreat abashed as trespassers. At the back of the court is a good example of the wire fence installed in many places in place of the solid board fence, to permit of the free circulation of air. It should be noted that the solid blinds of old-time Philadelphia dwellings are similar undesirable barriers to the medicinal out-of-doors. So many tenants need to be taught the therapeutic virtues of fresh air!

Damp walls constitute a serious problem for the superintendent. Tenants constantly complain of leakage into cellars. Often the water collecting against the sashes of cellar windows or seeping under them rots the sashes. If plastering is done directly on brick walls, the dampness will come through in cold weather and appear in the form of "sweating" on the inside. Much experimentation has developed the fact that the cheapest and most satisfactory procedure is to give the walls several applications of the substance known as tunlin. In some places this has been in use three years on the walls and still keeps the moisture from coming through.

For instance, in the Kenilworth Street houses we note that the new window-sashes are of bass wood, a good-looking and easily-handled material. It now costs considerable more than it did a little while ago. We find that the superintendent, before the price soared, bought a quantity for that would now cost 0 at least. It is, he explains, soft enough to work in, old enough to have dried out, and the best possible material for satisfactory mitre-joints.

We find that he bought twenty-five kegs of nails, in anticipation of the rise, two days before there was an advance in price of 40 cents a keg. When it is necessary in all ways to keep down prices for the sake of low rents, and the dividing-line between profit and loss is so precisely drawn, a saving of on one such transaction is no trifling affair.

Nor does the Association save by cheating its tenants as the former landlord did in the house where the twenty-seven thicknesses of wall-paper were removed. It was found that this particular miscreant had used manure instead of hair as a binder for the plaster.

The paint is of much the same color. That means a match is readily obtainable without making a special mixture.

All houses are fitted up for gas, an inexpressible relief to the housekeeper who must otherwise face the hot range in summer.

Every effort is made to conserve the backyard trees, and it is the superintendent's favorite theory that these trees are meant to be sat under and played under, as well as to shade the windows and the courts.

The Association in its office-building at 613-15 Lombard Street utilizes the first floor for its own purposes, and rents the two upper floors to careful tenants. The repair shop in the basement has been mentioned. All day long the tenants of every race, and condition come to pay the rent or to seek light upon the wide range of personal and social problems indicated in the preceding pages. They are given to feel that the office is their office, and that a deaf ear will never be turned to anyone who really needs and honestly deserves counsel. They are receiving free of charge--though they may be unaware of the fact--a business and a social education. They find the data bearing on their individual cases card-catalogued, and if they should be guilty of evasion, an accurate system of book-keeping will bring them to confusion. No record of a transaction in the business of the Association depends upon haphazard recollection or mere say-so. The office-hours are conducted without fuss or flurry, the floors are spotless, the desks are cleared for action. Waste motion is eliminated, the virtues of thrift and of system are illustrated, and still there is heart and human feeling in the enterprise. It is not possible to visit the headquarters without realizing at once the atmosphere of sincerity and diligence and practical success that surrounds the work. It is philanthropy; and it is business.

V DOES IT PAY?

Now we come to the question--does it pay? Obviously there are two sides to the answer, one the material, the other the spiritual. Let us consider, in the first place, the actual cash return.

We have already cited the satisfactory financial results in the case of a few typical properties. It is a postulate that those who are looking for the largest possible dividend on an investment without regard to any other consideration will scarcely be satisfied with the 4 per cent. which the Association is paying. The stockholders of the Association and the directors as a rule are glad to realize that their investment is providing good homes for the poor at low cost, and they are content to forego the somewhat higher profits that might accrue if nobody cared how the tenants lived.

A trust company, in behalf of an estate, had charge of a group of small houses erected as model homes for the poor. Under the trust company's management, the average gross income from these houses for three years was per month and the net income was .34 per month. The property came under the control of the Association. During the first two years under the new order the gross income was 8, and the net income was . The trust company, far from the scene, sent a clerk or depended on the services of a local real estate agent. Neither personally interested himself in the welfare of a tenant. The Association sent the friendly rent-collector who immediately reported the need of repairs, watched the workmen, stood at all times in the closest personal relation to the living problem of the householder, and obtained good tenants as soon as vacancies occurred, thus reducing to a minimum the losses due to unlets.

We see that under the system of absentee landlordism the net returns were about a fifth of the gross receipts, while under the system of constant personal vigilance the net returns were about one-half of the gross income.

The inherent possibilities of the Association's system extended to Chambers of Commerce or Boards of Trade or Women's Clubs are almost infinite. One of the best rent-collectors the Association has had says that the essential things are "to know the value of money and of punctuality, a little housekeeping, a little home-making--the rest will come in the doing." Collectors of this type, in the employ of the Association, could give invaluable aid as agents to trust companies and other organizations that occupy a fiduciary relation toward the owners of property in the congested areas.

The organization and operation of the Model Homes Company, formed to build the group of houses in the Richmond district, have been described. To show how closely, from long experience, the Association figures on the cost of repairs and other expenses, a leaf may be taken from the account books of the Model Homes Company. These estimates and actual costs are, except as noted, for a year ending November 29, 1916.

Estimated Actual Taxes $ 780.00 $ 779.97 Water rents 382.50 382.50 Repairs & allowances 675.00 327.75 Depreciation 450.00 450.00 Unlets 302.00 138.10 Losses 9.00 Fire Insurance 30.88 30.88 Liability Insurance 26.66 26.68 Cost of Collection 441.75 413.60 Interest on Mortgages 1,870.00 1,575.36

Here is another example of the profitable handling of houses that had seen better days.

In 1903 the Association bought as agent two four-story brick houses about half occupied by a low class of negroes. Everything within and without was as bad as it could be. The houses had been converted from private residences into tenements without the knowledge of the city authorities. Behind the larger houses were six of the little "one, two, three" houses, all served by one hydrant. The owners had relied entirely on an agent who cared for nothing but the rents. When at last they saw what they had on their hands they were horrified, and parted with it for a lower price than they had named at first--,870.26. The alterations and repairs came to ,214.06. The ground rent was ,700. The insurance was .00. Five per cent. commission to the Association for making repairs added 0.70, giving a total cost of ,990.02.

Now let us see what the Association got out of it, after putting in toilet facilities, skylights and windows, repairing roofs and rain conductors, plastering the walls and painting the woodwork, providing fire-escapes and making all minor repairs. In the larger houses the weekly rents were 78 cents per room, and in the smaller 55 cents per room, or .65 for the house.

The rents in the first year, 1904, were ,210.95. Taxes were 6.21; water rents, .50; repairs, 4.37; 7 1/2 per cent. commission to the Association, .80. This gave a balance to the owner of 8.07, or a net return of 7.7 per cent. on the investment.

In the year following the rents were ,203.55, and the balance to the owner was 2.81, or 8.2 per cent. net on the investment.

The Association does not expect to show a return greater than 4 per cent.; it does not promise even this. It finds it advisable in some cases to withhold a return for a time and turn back what profits there may be into the improvement of the property. This has been done by the express desire of the owners in certain instances. A temporary stringency of the market and the high cost of building materials or of labor are conditions that are instantly reflected in the balance sheet of an organization traveling on so close a margin. But prudent husbandry has made it possible to show that while the return in exceptional instances has fallen below four per cent. it has frequently risen to double or nearly double that figure. We have seen that on the League Street houses in the Second Ward the return soon after occupation was 7.5 per cent. per annum, and these were houses in an exceedingly dilapidated condition. The North Third Street property from which the hundreds of barrels of filth were taken showed a return of six per cent. in the first year.

The total income of the Association for 1916 was ,496.23. From rentals there accrued ,834.23; the agency commissions totalled ,792.84; the dividend on Model Homes Company stock was ,400.00; commissions on new construction and renovation planned and supervised for other owners amounted to ,469.16. As the expenses of operation came to ,799.26, the net earnings for the year were ,696.97. The dividend of 4 per cent. payable February 1, 1917 left a small balance of .26 to add to the outstanding surplus of ,973.01,--a surplus chiefly created by gifts and bequests to the Association.

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