The content of the country house costing $5000 to $10,000 will be approximately 50,000 to 70,000 cubic feet, or 10,000 for a person.  The suburban block will furnish about 12,000 to 20,000 for the family, while the city apartment of six so-called rooms renting for from $400 to $500 a year shrinks to 6000 to 8000 cubic feet, giving only one tenth the air-space the country house affords, as well as far less outside air and sunshine.  The best city tenements cost $1 a week for 600 cubic feet air-space.  What wonder that the sanitarian is aghast at the prospect!

According to the President of the English Sanitary Inspectors’ Association it seems probable that if the nineteenth-century city continues to drain the country of its potentially intellectual class and to squeeze them into smaller and smaller quarters, it will dry up the reservoirs of strength in the population (address, Aug. 18, 1905).

The houses of the Morris Building Co., illustrated in Chapter II, show what may be done.  These houses rent for $35 to $45 a month with constant heat and hot water, so that the heavy work is reduced to a minimum; but the exigencies of family life are illustrated in the fact of the almost universal demand of the tenants for continuous heat and hot water night as well as day.  The ordinary childless apartment house banks its fires at night.  A supplementary apparatus would mean work by the tenants, however.  This is a good example of the balance which must be struck in all new plans until they are tested.

The change in what one gains under the name of shelter, what one pays rent for, must be kept clearly in mind.  Two or three decades since it was a tight roof, thinly plastered walls, and a chimney with “thimble-holes for stoves,” possibly a furnace with small tin flues, a well or cistern, or perhaps one faucet delivering a small stream of water.  To-day even in the suburbs there is furnished light, heat, abundant water, care of halls and sidewalks.  The elevator-boy takes the place of “buttons,” the engineer and janitor relieve the man of the house of care, so that it may not be so extravagant as it sounds to give one third the $3000 income for rent, since it stops that leaky sieve, that bottomless bag of “operating expenses.”  The income may be pretty definitely estimated in this case, especially if meals are taken in the cafe.  If the family dine as it happens, the cost mounts up.  Here are a few estimates for verification and criticism: 

Rent of an apartment............$ 600.00 to $ 700.00
Meals........................... 1200.00  "  1000.00
Clothing........................  400.00  "   600.00
Incidentals, amusements, etc....  200.00  "   300.00
Savings, nil.
---------   --------
Total income................... $2400.00 to $2600.00

If the wife can manage the “kitchenette” and part of the clothing, about $600 may be saved, but in that case it represents her earnings, and should be at her disposal.  If it should be possible for safe shelter to be had for $400, then with the wife’s help $700 should be the sum in the “region of choice.”  I hold that, unless the income can be managed so as to secure choice, all the daily toil is embittered.  Even if some is spent foolishly, it is safer than the burden “just not enough.”