=Municipal Utilities.=—­Similar problems arose in connection with the street railways, electric light plants, and other utilities in the great cities.  In the beginning the right to construct such undertakings was freely, and often corruptly, granted to private companies by city councils.  Distressing abuses arose in connection with such practices.  Many grants or franchises were made perpetual, or perhaps for a term of 999 years.  The rates charged and services rendered were left largely to the will of the companies holding the franchises.  Mergers or unions of companies were common and the public was deluged with stocks and bonds of doubtful value; bankruptcies were frequent.  The connection between the utility companies and the politicians was, to say the least, not always in the public interest.

American ingenuity was quick to devise methods for eliminating such evils.  Three lines of progress were laid out by the reformers.  One group proposed that such utilities should be subject to municipal or state regulation, that the formation of utility companies should be under public control, and that the issue of stocks and bonds must be approved by public authority.  In some cases state, and in other cases municipal, commissions were created to exercise this great power over “quasi-public corporations.”  Wisconsin, by laws enacted in 1907, put all heat, light, water works, telephone, and street railway companies under the supervision of a single railway commission.  Other states followed this example rapidly.  By 1920 the principle of public control over municipal utilities was accepted in nearly every section of the union.

A second line of reform appeared in the “model franchise” for utility corporations.  An illustration of this tendency was afforded by the Chicago street railway settlement of 1906.  The total capital of the company was fixed at a definite sum, its earnings were agreed upon, and the city was given the right to buy and operate the system if it desired to do so.  In many states, about the same time, it was provided that no franchises to utility companies could run more than twenty-five years.

A third group of reformers were satisfied with nothing short of municipal ownership.  They proposed to drive private companies entirely out of the field and vest the ownership and management of municipal plants in the city itself.  This idea was extensively applied to electric light and water works plants, but to street railways in only a few cities, including San Francisco and Seattle.  In New York the subways are owned by the city but leased for operation.

=Tenement House Control.=—­Among the other pressing problems of the cities was the overcrowding in houses unfit for habitation.  An inquiry in New York City made under the authority of the state in 1902 revealed poverty, misery, slums, dirt, and disease almost beyond imagination.  The immediate answer was the enactment of a tenement house law prescribing in great detail the size of the rooms, the air space, the light and the sanitary arrangement for all new buildings.  An immense improvement followed and the idea was quickly taken up in other states having large industrial centers.  In 1920 New York made a further invasion of the rights of landlords by assuring to the public “reasonable rents” for flats and apartments.