LAND SUBDIVISION 



279 



be included in the excellences of the property put within the reach of 

 the ordinary working-man. 



The low-cost development will be practicable only in those places 

 where the bread-winners can get easily and cheaply to their work. 

 Where the land is at all expensive, the low-cost development will in 

 general be characterized by the attempt to house as many people as 

 possible per square foot of lot. It will therefore have separate dwellings, 

 each covering the maximum proportion of its lot, or semi-detached or 

 two-family houses, or in the final case of economy of room, apartment 

 houses or flats, or houses in block. Poor people may be housed on 

 expensive land, as in our in-town tenement houses where they sacrifice 

 everything but absolute necessities to proximity to the city. This same 

 concentration of population may of course take place in higher cost 

 developments where the land is very expensive, as in the in-town apart- 

 ment houses or dwellings-in-blocks of people of means. The type of 

 low-cost development in which the landscape architect is likely to be 

 particularly interested, however, is that in which the land is sufficiently 

 cheap to allow of ample light and air and some beauty of building rela- 

 tion and planting. With the decentralization of industry, these results 

 may be obtained without requiring of the bread-winning members of 

 the family any considerable travel between home and work.* 



A high-cost development is one in which the purchasers can afi'ord 

 to pay not only for absolute essentials, but for such convenience, amen- 

 ity, and beauty as the land can ofi"er in excess of these. Such a develop- 

 ment may be far from town, since its owners have the leisure and the 

 money for the longer journey, or it may be near town, in which case 

 the greater cost appears not as a transportation charge but as first cost 

 of land. In either case, such a development would be characterized by 

 larger lots, wider spacing of houses, giving over of ample land for con- 

 venience and beauty of streets, and perhaps by restrictions which compel 

 the expenditure of a relatively large amount of money upon the houses, 

 and so to a considerable extent fix the social status of the purchasers. 

 Where the land is very expensive, however, the high-cost development 

 may be obliged to make the same sort of sacrifices that the low-cost 



* See the list and illustrations of low-cost housing developments given in John 

 Nolen's More Houses for Bridgeport^ 1916. 



