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7
afford some sort of machinery for the regular inspection and
supervision of some of the poorest and most squalid parts, but the
solution of and permanent remedy for dealing with the conditions
existing amongst that section of the people who inhabit Tenement
Houses lies much deeper than these, or any such Regulations.
Overcrowding
a Poverty
Problem.
We may call overcrowding by this or any other name we may
choose. We may invent Bye-Laws for harassing quite a large number
of the poorer and more helpless classes of the population, and we
may succeed in driving a good number of them about from place to
place, whilst others may get fined or sent to prison, but whatever
we may call it, and whatever it is pretended is and may be done
with it, the fact remains that this overcrowding, with all its attendant
evils, is a poverty problem, nothing more nor less.
High Rents and
Overcrowding.
Poverty causes
98 per cent, of
cases.
Some few years ago, amongst many other things, it was put
forward as an argument for more Regulations, that it was quite
wrong to suppose that high rents made overcrowding. The contrary
was suggested as the case, and it was said that the landlords farmed
out the rooms to each family, and so made the enormous rents
possible; in other words, that the overcrowding made high rents.
Since then I have gone somewhat fully into the matter from this
point of view, and, as a result of inquiry and observation, I am able
to say that if the cases of overcrowding are taken, and careful
inquiries made into the circumstances, it will be found that poverty
and inability to pay the rent is the cause of 98 per cent, of all the
cases that come under our notice.
Police Court
Fines no
remedy.
No check on
bad landlords
In many of the cases it will be found further that, from a variety
of circumstances, there are many who formerly had three rooms, and
can now only pay for two; and several others, who previously had
two, can now scarcely pay the rent of one.
No Regulations, with police-court fines and imprisonments can,
nor does, alter these facts.
So far from Regulations having checked the " rapacious landlord,"
they are, in many cases, only proving an additional burden on the
poor weekly tenants. The "rapacious landlord" does not, of necessity,