es of living at too close quarters, noisy children and
pianos, grumpy janitors, smelly garbage, have led to the latest phase:
non-housekeeping flats with daily care of a sort supplied by the janitor
if desired, a kitchenette where eggs and coffee for breakfast and dishes
for invalids may be prepared, and restaurants galore for other meals. Thus
the women of the family are set free to roam the streets in search of
bargains and to join others like unto themselves for matinees and
promenades.

This sort of shelter is increasing more rapidly than any other in all the
cities investigated. An estimate has been made that 80 or 90 per cent of
the recent building has been of this sort. Six rooms in an unfashionable
locality rent for about $25 or $30 a month; in a fashionable quarter, for
$200 to $250 per month, with a floor-space one half larger. These latter
cost about 50 cents per week per room for daily care, whereas the former,
if cared for from outside, are served only at intervals of two weeks or a
month. The inmates do most of the daily care themselves. While the
building is new and fresh this means little work; but as time goes on the
poor construction shows, the surface varnish wears off, cracks come, and a
general shabbiness appears, so that the tenant prefers to move into a new
building. The owner, or more probably the agent, puts on a little shining
varnish, and rents again without real repair, and these buildings also go
from bad to worse. Many of them are known to change tenants two or three
times a year. There is always a demand for the newest house.

A study of social conditions reveals the fact that for the larger part of
the wage-earners the house has come to be the place where money is spent,
not earned or even saved. It has gone back to its primitive use--shelter
from weather and a sleeping-place, a temporary one at that. A real-estate
authority has made the assertion that three fifths of the rent-payers in
large cities are made up of non-householders and one half of these are
confined to one room--mostly women. This indicates a change in
requirements for the housing of the individual as distinguished from the
family. And it is this element which has complicated city living to a
great extent, and to which attention has been drawn by the accusation that
home life is shirked by it.

To the bachelor man and maid are added the commercial traveller who leaves
wife and possibly child behind four fifths of the time