Public Regulation of Urban Housing

Gradually, however, the potential threat concept won its way, and now, in its maturity, promises to develop into a constructive force that will guide as well as defend. But defending is still the major part of its work: flies from neighboring privy vaults still cross lot-line fences in many American cities; victims of tuberculosis still emerge from their own dark rooms to spit on sidewalks that the rest of us must use; fire that originates in another man's improperly built house still threatens ours-it was the fires which destroyed large parts of our early wooden cities that first made us doubt a little the validity of every man's right to do as he would with his own. But many years elapsed, we went through many fly swatting campaigns, before we were convinced by our aching arms that we had a right to tell a fellow citizen what he must or must not do with his own stable manure and garbage. Then came a new urban developme t, roughly coincident with, and to a considerable degree consequent upon, our discarding horses and buggies and adopting more rapid mechanical means of transit. For these new means of transit were the cause of new threats. When our neighbor convert d his quiet one-family house into a noisy, swarming, multifamily dwellng, he injured us even more than he had by breeding flies. And the new means of transit led to conversions by w olesale. The trolley car, the elevated, the subway, changed whole sections of our cities within a decade or two from home neighborhoods into tenement areas. Now free-wheel

Garbage · Political science · Yard · Engineering · History · Urban Planning and Landscape Design · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies · Urbanization and City Planning