UNSANITARY HOUSING 31 



disease, death, degeneracy and crime. While it slumbers long in the 

 districts of the better classes, a day, however, arrives when even 

 here these conditions become manifest. The once fashionable 

 house is divided and subdivided and becomes the residence of poorer 

 and still poorer tenants. Decay and dilapidation make inroads on 

 the house and mark its degeneracy; and the social disease rapidly 

 spreads until the slum district is established. 



This is the process of evolution by which slums have come and 

 are coming into existence in different portions of Canada. The sec- 

 tions of the city of Toronto which, in the days of the early colony, 

 when Ontario and Quebec were known as Upper and Lower Canada, 

 contained the homes of the better classes, have to-day, in some in- 

 stances, degenerated into slums. I presume that similar conditions 

 exist elsewhere. 



The unsanitary conditions appertaining to the housing of the 

 working classes are not so apparent as they are amongst the abso- 

 lutely poor; but we must not flatter ourselves that this important 

 portion of the community are properly housed, for in many instances 

 they are not. This is equally true of the single man as it is of 

 the man with a family. The one boards in a house overcrowded, 

 unventilated and falling to decay; the latter, if he lives in a crowded 

 portion of a city, is forced either to rent an inferior house in a slum 

 locality, or to share a house with one or more of his fellows. Should 

 the married man live in the suburbs, it is perhaps in a shack town, 

 the whole family being crowded into one or two rooms intended to 

 serve as a kitchen annex to the house he hopes to build. His great 

 expectations are slow to materialize and frequently he, or some 

 others of his family, die in the making of a home victims of un- 

 sanitary housing. This is an example of the working man being 

 the victim of land speculators whose sugar-coated offers have led 

 him to launch out on a scheme of housing which they knew well it 

 was difficult for him to carry to a successful issue. The man has 

 paid too heavily for his land and finds the cost of building plus the 

 interest and annual payment, a greater burden than he contem- 

 plated. It is the lure of the land speculator. 



That, in the making of a nation, history repeats itself as regards 

 housing conditions, will be seen from the following interesting ex- 

 tract : 



" There has been proceeding for a number of years a 

 change of usage more than a change of actual property. 

 Whole streets and squares of houses formerly occupied by 

 single families and often good-class families, are now occu- 

 pied as separate dwellings on separate floors. The private 

 house has become a tenement house. There is a common 



