Section 2. — MODEL SUBURBAN VILLAGES.
As I have repeatedly stated already, but will state once more, for it is important enough to bear endless repetition, one of the first steps which must inevitably be taken in the reformation of this class, is to make for them decent, healthy, pleasant homes, or help them to make them for themselves, which, if possible, is far better. I do not regard the institution of any first, second, or third-class lodging-houses as affording anything but palliatives of the existing distress. To substitute life in a boarding-house for life in the streets is, no doubt, an immense advance, but it is by no means the ultimatum. Life in a boarding-house is better than the worst, but it is far from being the best form of human existence. Hence, the object I constantly keep in view is how to pilot those persons who have been set on their feet again by means of the Food and Shelter Dépôts, and who have obtained employment in the City, into the possession of homes of their own.
Neither can I regard the one, or at most two, rooms in which the large majority of the inhabitants of our great cities are compelled to spend their days, as a solution of the question. The overcrowding which fills every separate room of a tenement with a human litter, and compels family life from the cradle to the grave to be lived within the four walls of a single apartment, must go on reproducing in endless succession all the terrible evils which such a state of things must inevitably create.
Neither can I be satisfied with the vast, unsightly piles of barrack-like buildings, which are only a slight advance upon the Union Bastille — dubbed Model Industrial Dwellings — so much in fashion at present, as being a satisfactory settlement of the burning question of the housing of the poor.
As a contribution to this question, I propose the establishment of a series of Industrial Settlements or Suburban Villages, lying out in