CORRESPONDENCE 487 



early stages of the slum-dwelling because he is unable to find 

 any other place to live in. Such a man would be the first 

 to leave the slum. If he is not taken out of the slum, he and 

 his wife and family would so degenerate that in the process of 

 time they would actually be loath to leave the slum. They 

 would have sunk in the social scale to the level of the slum 

 and would not feel happy in better surroundings. 



You will see, therefore, that I would not advocate a frontal 

 attack on slums. I would use the money that it would cost to 

 buy up and diminish slums for the purchase of land in the 

 suburbs, and I would draw away the slum-dweller to better 

 living conditions. 



The final stage would be the demolition of the slum area, 

 which by that time would be purchaseable at a proper price, 

 and not the exorbitant price that at present has to be paid. 

 The slums demolished, the area could very often be so laid out 

 as actually to show a profit by the use of the site for better 

 purposes ; but on no account should tenement houses be built 

 in the slum areas. If what had formerly been a slum area 

 was not required for better uses by the town, then it should be 

 laid out on a basis as nearly approaching the basis of ten houses 

 to the acre as possible and used for the housing of the people. 

 These would then become veritable oases in the desert of weary, 

 monotonous streets. 



Now, with regard to the prevention of the growth of new 

 slums in the future, this is entirely a matter of town-planning. 

 Let a town be properly planned, then building regulations can 

 be enforced under the Town Planning Act, limiting the number 

 of houses per acre, and slums become impossible ; for, once the 

 streets are laid out on what I may call broad-gauge lines and 

 the property gets built thereon, it can no more be altered in 

 the future to produce a tangle of mean streets and sordid 

 dwellings than you could change Kensington or Regent's Park. 

 It was the original planning of the slum area on the basis often 

 of fifty houses to the acre (in some cases what are called " back- 

 to-back " dwellings, in other cases what are almost as bad, 

 with only barrow-ways at the backs between two monotonous 

 rows, and the permitting of building under these conditions) 

 that produced the slum. I have known slum conditions to 

 appear in an area so planned and built on within twenty years — 

 that area before the builder erected these over-crowded dwellings 



