STRENGTH OF THE NATION DEPENDS ON THE HOME

Some of our states and many of our cities have laws to regulate housing conditions, but such laws seldom apply to small communities.  In cities where people live crowded together in closely built city blocks, unsanitary conditions in one home endanger the health of the entire community.  There is also danger from fire, and vice and crime may breed and spread quickly and unseen.  The community is driven, therefore, in its own defense, to regulate the people’s housing.  In small communities, and especially in rural communities, where homes are more widely separated and in some cases quite isolated, it has seemed of little concern to others how one citizen builds his home and what he does in it.  Thoughtful consideration of such cases as that described above, however, must convince us that it is a matter of national concern what happens even in remote homes.  Both the physical and the economic strength of the nation are undermined by unwholesome conditions in the separate homes of the land.

COMMUNITY PLANNING

Economic loss to the community may result not merely from unwholesome home conditions, but also from inconvenience of location and arrangement of the homes.  A good deal of attention is being given to “community planning” in the United States and especially in England and other European countries.  Community planning includes not only provision for the proper location and construction of public buildings and streets, for water supply, lights, parks, etc., but also for the convenient, as well as wholesome and pleasant location of homes.  Large cities, like London, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, have spent enormous sums of money in city planning after they have already grown up without plan.  It has necessitated destroying old structures and widening streets.  Villages and small towns are in a position to introduce a plan for future growth without this needless expense.  Our beautiful capital city of Washington has grown according to a plan that was carefully laid out before a building was erected.  But even in Washington one of the greatest problems the city had to face during the war was that of providing homes for the enormous number of workers who came to the city to do the work of the government.

PLANNING THE FARMSTEAD

“The need of careful arrangement in country homes is much more urgent than in city homes for the reason that country people use their homes as the business center of their profession,” says Prof.  R.J.  Pearce, of Iowa State College.  “The farmer in his business center must not only produce enough raw material to provide for him self and family, but he needs to produce enough to feed and clothe the entire human race.”  “Conservation of Space must be taken into consideration