This sort of shelter is increasing more rapidly than any other in all the cities investigated.  An estimate has been made that 80 or 90 per cent of the recent building has been of this sort.  Six rooms in an unfashionable locality rent for about $25 or $30 a month; in a fashionable quarter, for $200 to $250 per month, with a floor-space one half larger.  These latter cost about 50 cents per week per room for daily care, whereas the former, if cared for from outside, are served only at intervals of two weeks or a month.  The inmates do most of the daily care themselves.  While the building is new and fresh this means little work; but as time goes on the poor construction shows, the surface varnish wears off, cracks come, and a general shabbiness appears, so that the tenant prefers to move into a new building.  The owner, or more probably the agent, puts on a little shining varnish, and rents again without real repair, and these buildings also go from bad to worse.  Many of them are known to change tenants two or three times a year.  There is always a demand for the newest house.

A study of social conditions reveals the fact that for the larger part of the wage-earners the house has come to be the place where money is spent, not earned or even saved.  It has gone back to its primitive use—­shelter from weather and a sleeping-place, a temporary one at that.  A real-estate authority has made the assertion that three fifths of the rent-payers in large cities are made up of non-householders and one half of these are confined to one room—­mostly women.  This indicates a change in requirements for the housing of the individual as distinguished from the family.  And it is this element which has complicated city living to a great extent, and to which attention has been drawn by the accusation that home life is shirked by it.

To the bachelor man and maid are added the commercial traveller who leaves wife and possibly child behind four fifths of the time.  For him, as for several other classes of young business men, the locality which he can choose for headquarters changes with the requirements of business.  He is under orders and must go at a moment’s notice across the continent, perhaps.  It is not his fault but the exigency of business that destroys the desire for a permanent abiding-place.  The numbers of such homeless young people are far greater than any one but the real-estate agent realizes.  Then this loosening of the home tie renders easy the shifting from city to country and seashore.  A considerable proportion of the $2000 to $5000 class shut up the flat or leave the boarding-house several times in the year.  There is usually one place where the furniture and bric-a-brac and the other season’s clothing are kept, but it is only a storehouse or a temporary retreat that holds their property, growing less and less as they move, until they may practically live in their trunks.