TO OWN OR TO RENT: A DIFFICULT QUESTION.

“Half the sting of poverty is gone when one keeps house for
one’s own comfort and not for the comment of one’s neighbors.”
 - Miss MULOCK.

When the ideals of an older generation are forced upon a younger, already struggling under new and strange environment, the effect is often opposite to that intended. The elders in their pride of knowledge, and the real-estate promoters in their greed for gain, have been urging the young man to own his house on penalty of shirking his plain duty. They say he must have a home to offer his bride, as the bird has a nest. Building-loan associations, homes on the instalment plan, appeal to the sentiments they think the young man ought to heed.

The young man is often modest, almost always sensitive, and he prefers to bear dispraise rather than to tell the real reason he hesitates. His ear is closer to the ground, he feels even if he cannot express the doubt of the disinterestedness of the land-scheme promoter, of the wisdom of his father. He knows better than his elders the uncertainties of salaried men, young men with a way to make in the unstable conditions of to-day.

The effect of this well-meant advice is not to hasten his marriage, but to put it off because he is not allowed to take the course he feels safest. Or if he is willing, the parents of his prospective bride are not, and so young people do not marry on $1000 a year, for fear of the elder generation and their supposed wisdom.

The young people are not justified by present-day conditions in owning a house on an income of $2000 a year unless

(1) They have money to put into it which it will not cripple them for life to lose;

(2) They care so much for the idea of ownership that they are willing to take the risk of losing one half the investment should they be compelled to move;

(3) They possess the fortitude to give it up at the call of duty after all they have lavished on it;

(4) They care enough for the real education and the real fun they will get out of it to save in other ways what the running and repairs will cost over and above the amount estimated. This saving will be largely by doing many things with their own hands.

To be bound hand and foot either by unsalable real estate or by sentiment is an uncomfortable condition for the young family who may find itself in uncongenial surroundings, in an unhealthful situation, or who may need to retrench temporarily.

Another serious objection to building and owning a house in the first years of married life is the chance that the house will be too large or too small, or the railroad station will be moved, or the trolley line will be run under the garden window, or a smoking chimney will fill the library with soot (although the latter will not be permitted in the real twentieth-century town).

A new element has come into the question of ownership by the family of limited means which did not meet the elder generation of house-owners. In the past the repairs were confined to a coat of paint now and then, new shingles, an added hen-house, or a bay window. The well might have to be deepened, but little expense was put into or onto the house for fifty years. The married son or daughter might add a wing, but the main house once built was never disturbed. In the modern plastic condition of both ideals and materials this is all changed. In any city well known to my readers how many streets bear the same aspect as five years ago? In any suburban village made familiar by the trolley how many houses are the same as five years ago? Even if their outward aspect is not changed, that worst of all havocs, new plumbing, has been put in. The installation of neither furnace nor plumbing is accomplished once for all; at the end of ten years at most repairs or replacement must be made on penalty of loss of health. As the community grows in wisdom and in knowledge it makes sanitary regulations more stringent notwithstanding the fact that the increase in expense bears most heavily on the small householder with a family whose need is out of proportion to the income. Many a parent who grieves the loss of his child would gladly have paid a reasonable sum for repairs, but would have been in the poor debtors’ court if he had allowed the plumbers to enter his house. The new laws made since he bought his house require diametrically opposite things, and the old fittings must all be torn out as well as four times as costly put in.

It is a sad fact that the advantages of all modern sanitation are so often denied to those who need and who would appreciate them. The renter has here an advantage over the owner. He can call for an examination by the city or town inspector before he takes a lease; the capitalist owner must then put matters right. But as yet a man has a right to live with leaky sewer- or gas-pipes in his own house without being disturbed by an inspector. How far into the century this will be allowed is uncertain; in time there will be an inspection of the premises of the small owner.

The only remedy in sight is for an investment of capital in up-to-date houses of various grades in city, suburbs, and country; such investment to bring 4 per cent, not 40, or even 15, unless by rise of land values. No better use of idle money could be made at the present time. In “Anticipations” Mr. Wells writes: “The erection of a series of experimental labor-saving houses by some philanthropic person for exhibition and discussion would certainly bring about an extraordinary advance in domestic comfort; but it will probably be many years before the cautious enterprise of advertising firms approximates to the economies that are theoretically possible to-day.” This is truer now than when Mr. Wells was writing.

The great difficulty in the way is the first outlay. So many things will have to be designed, patterns made and machinery built to make them; for this advance in construction will not be by hand-made things. There will be more head-work put into the various articles, but the mass of constructive material must be machine-made, at least for the family of limited income. And these articles need not be ugly. There must be many of the same kind in the world, to be sure; but if the design fits the purpose, this may not be an evil. No one objects to a beautiful elm-tree in his field because in hundreds of fields there are similar elm-trees. Slight variations in finish, color, etc., can give individuality to the simplest chair.

Therefore the first outlay for the new order will be beyond the purse of any single family of this group. If we had learned to cooperate sanely, a group might undertake it, but the most probable method will be for some far-sighted men to agree to sink a certain amount of money in experiment, just as they now sink money in prospecting a mine with all the uncertainty it brings. Ability to risk in an experiment must go hand in hand with capital to use.

The objection commonly made is that all individuality will be taken away, that each one must live like every one else in the neighborhood. This is not an essential consequence, but will it be so impossible to have a certain similarity in the dwellings of like-minded people? In “Anticipations” it is declared that “Unless some great catastrophe in Nature breaks down all that man has built, these great kindred groups of capable men and educated adequate women must be under the forces we have considered so far, the element finally emergent amid the vast confusions of the coming time."

The practical people, the engineering and medical and scientific people, will become more and more homogeneous in their fundamental culture.

The decreasing of the space one can call one’s own within urban limits has so steadily increased, and the need for freer air has become so fully recognized, that the case of the single householder in the suburbs and even in the country is bound to press harder and harder. The group system elsewhere referred to, with central heating plant and workers of all grades at telephone-call, will make possible at a reasonable rent within easy reach of the city the single household of one, two, or three, as the case may be, and if without children of their own, to such shelter may come some of those homeless little ones we have with us always, to share in the sun and wind and garden. In the real country, with acres instead of feet of land, much of the same kind of elaborate simplicity will be found. Certainly the same kind of fire-proof house of only one story with more light, “roofs of steel and glass on the louver principle,” will obviate so frequent a change of air as a shut-in house requires, and give more equable temperature.

In the city? Since physicians will surely be more insistent on light, as well as fresh air, roof-gardens and balconies and glazed walls, so to speak, will be arranged by the architect so as not to offend the eye and yet to accomplish the results. He will cease from trying to put the new ideas of the twentieth century into the old houses of the eighteenth or fifteenth even, and that beauty, which is fitness, will come forth from the tangle of ugliness everywhere. If, as the economist tells us, “cost measures lack of adjustment,” then the perfectly adjusted house will not be costly in reality, it will be adapted to the production and protection of effective human beings.

The cellar has for some years been changing to a storage for trunks instead of vegetables. The old-fashioned housewife exclaims at the lack of storage in the house of to-day, and we are eliminating it still more. A twentieth-century axiom is, “Throw or give away everything you have not immediate or prospective use for.” It is as true of household furniture as of books; only the very best is of any value second-hand. Our young people may have heirlooms, but they will buy very little in the way of sideboards or first editions. The moral of modern tendencies is, buy only what you are sure you will need or what you care for so intensely that you will keep it come what may. Housing of possible treasures is far too costly.

At the foundation of the ethical side of ownership is the primitive impulse of possession, that ownership which led to wife-capture, to feudal castles, to accumulation of things, and to-day is expressed by the man who prefers to have his steak cooked in his own kitchen even if it is burned.

It is notorious that most of us put up with discomfort if it is caused by our own. A family of eight will use one bath-room without murmur if the house is theirs, but will complain loudly if the landlord will not add two without increasing the rent.

At the foundation of what seem exorbitant rents is this demand for modern improvements in old houses, and the atrocious carelessness of tenants of property. It is not their own, and they do not obey the golden rule in the use of it.

Every five years or so plumbing laws are changed, and if an old house is touched the fixtures and pipes must be all renewed. Tenants have learned to fear the sanitation of old houses, and yet abuse the appliances they should care for.

Public ownership or corporate ownership or an increased lawlessness are accountable for a disregard of others’ rights and of property which is unnecessarily increasing the cost of living.

I have said elsewhere that it is not because the landlord does not want children in the house but because he does not want such ill-bred children, vandals, who have no respect for anything. He charges high rent because his investment is good for only ten years.

The shibboleth of duty to own a home has so strong a hold on the moral sense of the people that it is made use of by the promoter who may in some cases think himself the philanthropist he intends others to call him. I mean that the duty of owning and the heinousness of paying rent are so ingrained that buying on the instalment plan has seemed a righteous thing, even with the examples of broken lives in plain sight. As an incentive to save, if there were anything to save, it might have been justified in the days of feudalism. But for an independent American to confess that he cannot put money in the bank, and that he must bind himself and his family to slavery, for the sake of owning a bit of property which they will probably wish to sell before they have it paid for, is disgraceful. Intelligent men should see that here is the profit in the transaction; that enough go to the wall to pay for the trouble of the rest, just as in life insurance enough die before the expected time to put money in the pockets of the riskers.

A drunken father may need to be held, but the young professor, the lawyer, the engineer, should have sufficient self-respect and firmness to save that which in his judgment is necessary, without being tied by “the instalment plan.” This method is a very viper in the finances of to-day. The wise business man never ventures more than he can afford to lose in a risk, but the man who takes bread and milk from his children to invest in “a sure thing” takes a risk with what is not his to give.

To buy land for investment is another supposed virtue, an inheritance from the time when slow growth, once started in a given direction, kept on, so that great acumen was not needed to buy; but that is all changed to-day. Only those “in the ring” can tell where the “boom” will go next.

In these days of unparalelled rapidity of change in industrial and social conditions it is most undesirable for a man to be hampered by a shell which is too large to carry about with him and too valuable to be left behind. To each reader will occur instances of the refusal of an advantageous offer because the family home could not be realized upon at once, the location once so favorable had become undesirable, and the values put into it could not be recovered because of social conditions following industrial changes.

The keen observer hesitates in view of all these conditions to advise any young man to invest in real estate for a home beyond a sum which he can afford to lose if need arises to move. These changes carry a need for mobilization of its army of workers. The encumbrance of family Lares and Penates cannot be tolerated. Only a small per cent of young men are to-day sure of remaining in the city in which they begin business. What folly to encumber themselves with real estate which, sold at a sacrifice, brings barely half its price! Moral exhorters have not carefully considered this side of the question in their arguments for house-owning and family-rearing as anchors to the young man.

The fact noted earlier is a case in point. After the wedding-cards were out the bridegroom was transferred to the charge of the company’s office in another city.

The expenses necessitated by these frequent removals make an unaccounted-for item in many incomes.

If the young couple have saved or inherited between them, say, $3000, shall they build a home with it? Decidedly not. Because the house will cost $5000 before they are done. Not only because of the unexpected in strikes and change in prices of materials, but because, as the plans take shape, the wife or the husband or both will see so many little points which they will ask for, the paper plan not having conveyed a definite idea to either. An excellent plan was carried out by a college woman. She made a model to scale in pasteboard, of such a size that every essential detail was shown in its relation to other portions of the structure.

Even if these young people do not yield at the moment of building, they will probably wish they had yielded when they come to live in the house. There will be nothing for it but to mortgage the place to make it satisfactory. One cannot take up a newspaper without finding notice after notice, reading, “Must be sold to pay the mortgage.”

Exorbitant rent is of course social waste, and society must protect its ablest young people from their own folly; but when they understand the rules of the financial game better they will lend themselves more readily to some cooperative plan of relief.

It is, as I well know, rank heresy, but I firmly believe that building and owning of houses can be afforded only by those having the higher limit of income, $3000 to $5000 a year, unless the person has a permanent position or a business of great security, and in these days who can be sure of anything?

When the land-scheme promoter advertises homes on the instalment plan, beware of the trap!

Let no one buy in the suburbs from a sense of duty and then hate the life.

Comfort in living is far more in the brains than in the back.

It is so easy for a man or woman with one set of ideals to do that which another would consider impossible drudgery.

My final advice is that the sensible young couple both of whom agree about essentials, and who are willing and glad to work together for a common end, and who love nature and gardening and believe in family life so strongly as not to miss the crowd and theatres, may safely start a home in the country with a garden, and pets for the children, if they have a reasonable prospect of ten years in one spot. Let them make the place attractive for some family, even if they have to leave it.

The women of this group will, I believe, have the qualities Mr. Wells predicts: not only intelligence and education, but a reasonableness and reliability not always found to-day.

Unless a reasonable prospect of ten years’ occupancy is assured, then begin life in a rented house, not necessarily in a flat. Begin with a few things of your own some which have been yours for years, some which you have bought together and which have a meaning for one of you and are not irritating to the other.

Devote a part of your leisure to a critical study of the house you would like, draw plans, make sketches in color, study color effects, learn about fabrics, collect them for the future. You will find an amusing and instructive occupation.

The essential point is to begin this life on two thirds of what you have reason to expect as the year’s income; keep the rest invested or in the bank. There are to-day many temptations to spend for things attractive in themselves but not necessary to the effective life. If friends are so silly as to rally you on living in an unfashionable quarter, ask them in to see your sketches and plans, and talk them into enthusiasm over the idea. Do missionary work with them rather than be ridiculed out of your convictions. It sometimes seems as if young people had no convictions, as if they drifted with the wind of newspaper suggestion. So do not allow your friends to drive you to greater expense than you have determined upon, lest the end of the first two years of life find you in debt with no fair start for the baby, whose life should begin in an atmosphere of quiet assurance that all is well. It is not impossible that the nervous irritability and recklessness of many are due to the atmosphere of childhood. Then remember that the welfare and security of the child is the watchword of the future.