LIFE IN AMERICA.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5457, 5 August 1929, Page 3

LIFE IN AMERICA.

END OF THE HOME. NO DOGS,' CATS, OR CHILDREN. In New York and Chicago last year 80 per cent, of the new buildings construction was for apartment houses. In 257 cities of the United States the proportion fas 54 per cent., compared with 25 per cent, seven years ago. Americans, and Canadians in less measure, are becoming a race of apartinent dwellers. The movement began in the big cities, and has now extended to rural centres. “The old home” is becoming a fiction term. Even the two-family type is disappearing. Children, dogs, and household pets are disappearing in the new social revolution. Children are not accepted in most apartment houses. Neither are they acceptable in a new phase of life under which the wife, as well as the husband, goes to work immediately following the honeymoon. Two million married women, mostly young, are at work in the United States. Breathing space is not needed in apartment houses. Every family has an automobile. The effect of the extension of the apartment house has been to reduce the value of dwellinghouses in the neighbourhood. New dwellinghouses are now rare, except in the country. Apartment houses get out of date in one or two years. For the same rental husband and wife can move to an apartment where almost everything is done by electricity. Cheaper types of apartment are being built in what were once “exclusive” districts, so that the family may, in outward appearances at least, “keep in with the Jones’s.” It is all at the expense of permanency and, in suburban areas, natural beauty.