Workers’ Houses in the Next Ten Years
Concurrent with the development of the war and long before the housing shortage came to be felt acutely, articles on post-war building reconstruction began to appear in the national press and popular periodicals.
With the bombing of English towns, evacuation, and compulsory billeting, came a marked increase in the numbers of such pronouncements. Like most other aspects of post-war reconstruction, our future architectural environment has been depicted in most attractive and novel forms.
The average reader may have been led to suppose that in some remarkable way the war will have made possible “ideal homes” for everyone and gardens for their children to play in, even though he may not have been so interested in schemes for new civic centres and roof-top aerodromes.
Those who have lost their homes by bombing, those who have been forced to live under the most cramped conditions in single rooms with shared kitchens, together with those who have always lived in this way, have perhaps been buoyed up by these promises of better times to come.
One cannot escape the conclusion that our rulers have been more than ready to accept the assistance of social reformers and unemployed but hopeful architects in this contribution to the maintenance of national morale.
And yet in these same papers, warnings of difficulties ahead seem to make game of their sanguine prospects. We are told that strict economy in national expenditure must be maintained. How much rent then will the wage worker be able to afford ? “Taxation’s burden on industry” will have to be minimised. How much will be spared for housing subsidies ? No secret is made of the possibility of mass unemployment. What kind of shelter will the unemployed be able to buy?
Of the physical difficulties resulting from the wartime cessation of building and disruption of the building industry, of the shortage of materials and skilled labour in face of an unprecedented housing shortage, little need be said here. The recent debates in Parliament have sufficiently exposed the situation and the inability of statesmen and experts to meet it. It is only necessary to add that it took twenty-five years between the wars for capitalism to produce four million houses, the number now said to be urgently required. Even if building were to proceed at its highest pre-war rate it would take over eleven years to build them.
It has been said that demolition has been carried out for us by the enemy, that the public are becoming increasingly aware of what technical progress can achieve, and that it will be in a mind to demand it.
As for the bombing, severe though it has been, it has demolished only a small part of our slums. Moreover, damaged houses can be patched up. According to the Minister of Health, of 2,750,000 houses damaged by bombing “no fewer than 2,700,000 houses in England and Wales have been given first-aid repairs, and more extended work has been done to 1,100,000” (statement in House of Commons, May 4, 1943, and to London Master Builders’ Association July 26, 1943).
Barrack-like tenements can be built on the ruins of slum houses in spite of a “public demand” for houses with gardens. Reporting Lord Latham, leader of the L.C.C., the News-Chronicle (April 1, 1943) states .-
“Thousands of Londoners in the eastern boroughs will, after the war, have to live in flats . . . houses could not be built because of the lack of space and the cost of land (our italics).
Public demand will be unavailing, unless the public understands more fully the nature of the so-called “housing problem”; understands how capitalism sets a limit to the, production of houses, as it does to the production of all other things required by the working class.
The capitalist system is based on the production and sale of goods for profit. To obtain this profit the capitalist purchases the physical and mental energies of the workers at their market price. With the ever-present competition of unemployed in the labour market, this price, or wage, is reduced to the bare minimum compatible with the maintenance of the worker in a physical and mental condition suited to the efficient performance of his work and to the reproduction of his kind. With regard to one aspect of this. Mr. Churchill has put the matter plainly: —
“You cannot conduct a modern community except with an adequate supply of persons upon whose education. whether humanitarian, technical or scientific, much time and money have been spent.” (Reported in the News-Chronicle, March 22, 1943.)
This necessary physical and mental standard will vary according to the kind of work on which the worker is engaged The kind of shelter necessary for himself and family will vary in the same way.
The agricultural worker and the miner can work and reproduce themselves even though their only protection is the squalid cottage or “back-to-back” slum. The skilled or “black-coat” worker must have slightly better conditions if the quality of his work is to be maintained, and if his children are to have an environment conducive to a higher standard of development.
By the natural competitive working of the labour market, the worker, then, finds himself, at best, with only sufficient money to rent accommodation of this minimum standard. Indeed, the Industries Group of P.E.P. (Political and Economic Planning) are of the opinion that: —
“. . . the income of the average working class family has been too small to enable it to buy as much shelter as is desirable for comfort and efficiency. (“Housing England,” p. 145—our italics.)
The modest improvement in the standard of new housing does not invalidate these general conclusions, for it should be noted that, between the wars, the technical level of most wage workers was rising. New housing scarcely kept pace with the increase in the number of families, so that the condition of the lower-paid sections was little affected.
In 1935 there were still 38,773 “back-to-back” houses in the “prosperous” city of Birmingham alone (Bourneville Research Trust, “When We Build Again,” p. 31), and according to Mr. Craven Ellis, in the same year there were in Great Britain 4,607,000 houses at least 80 years old, and of these 1,052,000 at least 180 years old (quoted in “Housing Before the War and After,” M. J. Elsas, p. 21).
That this state of affairs was the direct result of the poverty of the wage worker and not shortage of either labour or materials, is shown by the fact that in 1933 the average unemployment among building and public works employees had been 336,503, almost a third of the total engaged in these industries.
Writing in 1942, M. J. Elsas says : —
“If we could assume the mere quantitative problems of housing were to be solved in a not too distant future, it is to be hoped and expected that the qualitative problem will come to the fore. “(“Housing Before the War and After,” p. 30.)
The failure to supply even sufficient numbers of minimum dwellings is the inevitable outcome of the erratic course of capitalism, with its periodic cessation of building during slumps and wars; but what Mr. Elsas calls the “qualitative problem” will remain unsolved until capitalism, and with it the wages system, is abolished.
Only when a system is established based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, including building materials, land and plant, when wealth, including houses, is produced for use instead of profit; only, that is, under Socialism, will the workers obtain the kind of homes they want, and decent and commodious accommodation be available for all.
J. M.