[Illustration:  Floor-plan Drawing:  The Morris Building Company’s Block of Single Houses, with Central Heating Plant, Brooklyn, New York.]

[Illustration:  Floor-plan Drawing The Morris Building Company’s Block of Single Houses, with Central Heating Plant, Brooklyn, New York.]

Very probably it will be necessary to enlarge the scope and, perhaps, to build two stories higher, so that the elders and perhaps bachelors of both sexes, who do not care for the garden, may help to bear the expense of the children’s playground.  Whatever form the advance may take, this is a sign-post in the right direction.

In the nature of things, however, the first experiments will be costly and must be combined with business of a sure kind.  In this instance the heating and hot-water supply was made possible by a combination with factory plant.  But if a larger group of, say, one hundred houses were run by a central establishment, the Morris Building Company estimates the cost at about fifty dollars per year.

These houses will be referred to again under Chapter VI, but the especial value of this experiment was its social significance.  How much better to keep desirable land for residential purposes by such means than to permit families to move away and give up satisfactory dwellings solely because the lower end of the street has a few foreigners!  Our older cities abound in instances of this quick abandonment of most desirable streets without any concerted effort to retain their character.

The dangerous sanitary degeneration of these abandoned houses is one of the worst features of the situation and a prolific cause of the overcrowding of cities.

The more thoughtful students of progressive tendencies are grouping themselves in “parks” where houses are put up with the aid of the capitalist under such restrictions as to price as is supposed to insure a congenial neighborhood, and under such regulations as to land as to prevent manufacturing establishments.  When these plans are not purely speculative, designed to entrap the young people by their best hopes of a permanent home, much satisfaction may come from the plan.  But even in this country or suburban life the shadow of fashion falls sooner or later, and the savings vanish with the years.  Some deeper principle must come into play, some stronger force than mere whim of society leaders, before our young people can be released from the bondage of living on the right side of a street under penalty of social ostracism.

There are gratifying indications of an awakening.  The following statement appeared in a newspaper of a recent date: 

“A corporation of women has been formed in Indianapolis, Ind., for the purpose of building small but artistic houses for people of moderate means.  All of the directors are business women; one of the vice-presidents is Miss Elizabeth Browning, the city librarian, and another is the principal of one of the public schools.  The secretary has for some time been in charge of the office of a savings and loan association and is the only woman member of the Indianapolis fire insurance inspection board.  Six houses are to be erected at once in various parts of the city.”