UNSANITARY HOUSING S3 : 33 



IBM * 



It is not only, however, in the districts where old and 

 ramshackle houses are to be found that slums exist; but 

 they can also be found by the hundreds in those newer 

 acquisitions to our cities and towns commonly known as "shack 

 towns," those aggregations of wooden-walled, tar-paper covered, 

 tin tack-studded shacks and sheds which are intended for temporary 

 residences for the newly arrived immigrant, but which, in too many 

 instances, become the overcrowded permanent homes of a foreign 

 population, hot beds of parasitic and communicable diseases and 

 breeders of vice and iniquity. The immigrant must be housed and 

 in desperation he eagerly seizes upon the best he can find at the 

 price he can pay. If he can find nothing, either he or some specu- 

 lator runs up a shack in the suburbs, it may be of a city or town. 

 Whether he buys the land and builds the shack or rents it, he pays 

 exorbitant prices for the accommodation he secures. Thus have 

 sprung up our Little Italys, our Little Londons, and our China- 

 towns, devoid of the simplest of modern sanitary requirements. 

 This type of slum can well be described in the account given of an 

 Italian colony near Sault Ste. Marie, where there had been over 

 thirty cases of typhoid fever: 



"This colony is crowded into a lot of miserable shacks, 

 filthy both outside and inside; no cellars, no drainage, closets 

 on the surface of the ground, vile beyond description; water 

 from shallow wells, which were dirty and unfit for use, and 

 most of them located within a few feet of the closets."* 

 In Canada, we have been receiving and will continue to receive 

 the people from many of the European countries in increasing num- 

 bers. We have in our midst the inhabitants of Asiatic countries, 

 bringing with them their Oriental customs and habits. Each na- 

 tionality has its peculiar ideas as to how its people should live. 

 They all come with the one object of making a living, if not of 

 making money, although some few reach these shores imbued with 

 the one idea love of money, and in their eagerness to get money, 

 they often live more like swine than human beings. The shrine as 

 well as the Goddess of Hygeia are unhonoured and unknown. This 

 is no myth, for during some years as Public Health Officer in On- 

 tario, I have seen many instances of how some of these people 

 begin a " slum home " in the central part of a city, bring up a family 

 in it and carry on business under conditions which pen can but 

 imperfectly describe. 



One example of this may be pertinent, one which came under 

 my own notice some years ago. A newly married couple arrived in 



* Annual Report of the Provincial Board of Health of Ontario, 1906. 



