The Housing Problem [1899]

One of the easiest things to do in the world, is to find a solution. Quack remedies for existing disorders crop up, here and everywhere, in quite an alarming manner; if but twenty-five per cent of them were workable, there would be a speedy end to the social question. 

Unfortunately, however, for the promoters of these schemes and, perhaps, fortunately for a long suffering public, a scheme is one thing, its practicability another. There is a certain class of Socialists who seem to be quite unable to fix their attention upon any settled view of the social situation, but flit hither and thither ready to take up any freak of the imagination, label it Socialism and imagine thereby an advance to the future. These gentlemen, at the present moment are filled with the idea that they can by some magical touch of the municipal wand, transform the slumland of the worker into a veritable paradise of sanitation and comfort. In other words they want to house the poor better than they are housed just now.

So do we who are Anarchists; nothing would please us better than to think that we could do something toward altering the lamentable conditions of the slum-dwellers. Anything that would tend to make life brighter would receive our heartiest support. But, we venture to affirm that it is impossible, within the limits of the existing society, to appreciably alter the conditions of these people. 

Let us take our friend’s claims as they occur to us. The Housing of the Working Classes Act gives to Corporations and other local governing bodies, the power to buy out slum landlords, pull down insanitary areas; and in other ways to deal with this matter. Very nice, it sounds well, and the mere statement of these ‘powers’ is calculated to drive an appreciative – but thoughtless – audience to frantic applause! 

But what is the extent of the ‘powers’? These ‘powers’ are limited by the fact that a corporation can only borrow money equalling in value two years rateable value – a sum in any town most miserably inadequate to deal with an insanitary area. Most, if not all, slums are in or near the centre of our towns, and there the rateable values being high, land reaches an absurdly artificial price. We will assume that the slum is pulled down, you cannot put up cottage property on the same ground to meet the requirements of the dispossessed population; they were herded in single rooms before, and sanitation will not permit of that again, you have to increase the accommodation, you can’t buy more land, you must deal with that area you have to deal with, and the consequence is that you put up ‘model’ dwellings as you have done in Manchester, London, Birmingham, Glasgow and everywhere else where you have endeavoured the grapple with the matter. Yes, this is the issue: huge, unsightly prison-like barracks, where human beings are packed together, quite in accord with the latest requirements of sanitary ‘science’ but absolutely devoid of all that which tends to make life comfortable and liveable. The inmates are surrounded by a host of vexatious regulations, rules and restrictions. From a standpoint of comfort, these dwellings are worse than the slums. Imagine a man, his wife and, perhaps, four or five children living at the top of one of these five-storied abortions! What chance do the youngsters have of getting out of the miserable whitewashed rooms; it becomes positively an irksome job for the people under these conditions to go out of their domicile at all. Another thing our reforming friends have forgotten: the original dwellers in slumland do not go to these ‘improved’ dwellings, the rents in most cases are far too high, and are necessarily higher than they paid before, so they crowd into another district, and up springs another slum for the philanderers to play with! 

The ‘practical’ answers that the reformer had to meet objections with are as innumerable as they are absurd and trivial. Some propose to deal with the land value problem that arises by purchasing agricultural land – at purely nominal sums, you know! – and there at a distance of say three miles from the centre of the town erect cottages replete with all the latest improvements and possessing gardens and all else that the heart of a humble working man could desire. They miss a point or two here. The agricultural land that they propose to purchase will go up in price the moment any considerable attempt is made, then the tram or train fares added to the rent will, make the cost prohibitive to the very class that it was intended to benefit. 

Scheme, try as much as our reforming friends like, they are face to face with failure at the best. We, who are Anarchists, have not thought lightly about these matters, one touch of happiness to the degraded and oppressed worker is certainly worth getting if we can, ’tis but human to want to cheer the downcast, to brighten if but with a smile the crooked path of our less fortunate brothers, but we are face to face with stern, cold and hard facts, and we have to have them shifted before we could give the slightest support, in any shape or form, to reform proposals. 

The housing problem, inseparable as it is from the social problem, is but the effect of a cause: Capitalism with its protector, Government. People who live in slums, live there because they are poor; they are poor because they are robbed; if you want to get rid of the slum, you have first to better the workers’ position; in order to do this you must stop the robber: Capitalism. 

This means, Revolution, and Anarchism stands for this. No reforms, say we, no tinkering, no halting, but hand in hand to the destruction of Private Property. We want no compromise, so far as our energies go we fight to remove the cause and know that only on the ruins of an effete and rotten society can there spring up that time of happiness for all, the mere thought of which stirs our hearts to still greater enthusiasm, and incites us to redouble our efforts for it. 

W. M. 

Freedom : a Journal of Anarchist Communism, December 1899