d the same is true as regards the
most valuable portions of Paris, New York, and other large cities.
This decentralising force is, however, only in full operation in the
very centre of the largest cities. The first effect of the competition
of commercial with living premises is to raise house-rents and to
drive the poorer population into narrower, less commodious, and less
sanitary dwellings. Where ground landowner and builder have a free
hand the market value of central ground for small, lofty, cheap-built
slums can be made to hold its own for a long time with the business
premises which surround them. Even when ground value has risen so high
as to displace many of these slums, the tendency is for the latter to
spring up and thicken in districts not far removed from the centre.
Thus in London the densest population is found in Whitechapel and St.
George's in the East. Indeed, there is evidence that these districts
have already reached "saturation point," that is to say, the pressure
of business demands for ground, the increased competition of the
dwellers themselves, and the growing restrictions imposed by law and
public opinion upon the construction of the most "paying" forms of
house property, prevent any further growth of population in these
parts. As this saturation point is reached in one district, the growth
of dense population goes on faster in the outlying districts, and,
with forms which vary with local conditions, the same economic forces
manifest themselves with similar results over a wider area. The poorer
population shifts as short a distance as it can, and then only when
driven by a rise of rents. Even when it moves somewhat farther out it
seldom gets far enough to escape the centralising forces. Residential
working-class districts like West Ham become rapidly congested by the
constant flow of population from more central places. Moreover, the
same decentralising forces are set up in the large suburban districts,
by the planting there of factories and other industrial works designed
to take advantage of a large supply of labour close at hand, and land
procurable at a lower rental. This applies also to many of the suburbs
originally chosen as residential quarters of the well-to-do classes.
The whole western district of London, comprised by Kensington, Notting
Hill, Hammersmith, etc., contains large and designed areas of dense
poverty and overcrowding. So far as the mass of poorer workers in
London and other