Contest to Improve Housing Conditions of Immigrants

Progress, Volume XI, Issue 9, 1 May 1916, Page 615

Contest to Improve Housing Conditions of Immigrants

With the aim of arousing interest in the subject of housing conditions of immigrants in industrial towns, as well as to produce carefully worked out and entirely practicable housing plans and standards which it will be possible for employers and workmen and communities alike to demand and insist upon, there has been inaugurated a housing competition and public exhibition under the auspices of the National Americanization Committee, with the cooperation of the various societies and institutes of architects and engineers.

Prizes aggregating £420 arc offered for plans, sketches, grouping and arrangement, for the housing of immigrants in industrial towns. The prizes arc divided into two groups. The first covers plans for the housing of workmen in industrial communities not exceeding a population of 35,000. Entries in this class include plans for (1) single family

houses; (2) combined family and lodging houses, which will permit separation of the family from the lodgers; and (3) boarding houses or community dwellings for numbers of single men or of single women. The second group offers prizes for a satisfactory substitute for the derailed freight and cattle cars now used to house construction gangs on railways.

In announcing' the competition, the committee calls attention to the fact that new communities clustered around new industries are being produced in America with phenominal rapidity. It is the small industrial town at present, not the large city, in which the “congestion” problem of the country is centred. Men flock by thousands to places where there are plenty of jobs— no dwellings.

One point of difference between architects’ houses and those built by the spiculative builder is the cost of repairs. An ill-built house is incapable of being satisfactorily repaired.