Читать книгу Industrial Housing - Andrew J. Thomas - Страница 5

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New times bring new problems and housing is one of these. In the picture of industrial expansion, as it exists in the minds of most people, housing does not figure prominently. The need of the wage-earner for a home is assumed to care for itself in the market furnished by the local real estate interests. Although all the resources of finance and of technical skill, driven by a relentless impulse for progress, are marshalled to secure the utmost efficiency of manufacturing plants, of railroads, shipping and other transport, as well as of many types of buildings like banks, warehouses and schools, how much science is used to keep the housing of the people abreast of the times?

The increasing complexity of the times and the steady rise in prices now bear very heavily on housing, and, in cities where industrial expansion takes place, breakdowns in housing production are occurring. It is not so much that new houses for the wage-earners are not built, but that such houses as are built are too expensive and of a low standard. Bayonne furnished one of these examples of housing breakdown.

Such was the local situation in 1917, and a new event arrived to precipitate the crisis. This was the entrance of the United States into the World War.

When war was declared, the business leaders in Bayonne knew that the local housing market could not well take care of the renewed influx of workers which would result from the big contracts for war material which were expected at the Bayonne plants. A small group of men, acting at the instance of the Bayonne Chamber of Commerce, undertook to deal ​with the situation in an effective way. This was the special Housing Committee of the Chamber of Commerce, headed by Mr. C. J. Hicks, Executive Assistant to the Chairman and to the President of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.

Mr. Hicks took a deep interest in the matter from the first. His first care was to survey the housing situation of the Bayonne workers and then to formulate a program of principles, upon which remedial action should be based. This he did, and the most striking thing about his ideas is, that, notwithstanding the critical nature of the local situation and the war emergency confronting him, he made no concession to expediency, but, instead, set the standards to be embodied in the local housing high above the ordinary. He recognized the essential of low cost, but he also insisted that the highest architectural ideal be attained. Specifically, he urged housing of an "open" plan, having all rooms flooded with daylight, and provided with complete sanitary equipment, set in garden surroundings, with sufficient recreation space. The Committee agreed that the restricted amount of land available in Bayonne made necessary the apartment type rather than detached homes or housing of the row type.