tion: Aerial-view Drawing: The Morris Building Company's Block of
Single Houses, with Central Heating Plant, Brooklyn, New York.]

These attractive and comfortable houses, so near the working places of
the teachers and professional and business men who occupy them, were
possible only because of the comparative cheapness of the land, which had
been held undesirable for high-class single houses, not for sanitary
reasons, but solely on account of social conditions. This cluster of forty
houses makes its own atmosphere. This is the lesson to be learned. Let
groups of like-minded families make their own surroundings. The capitalist
will soon learn where his interest lies.

[Illustration: Floor-plan Drawing: The Morris Building Company's Block of
Single Houses, with Central Heating Plant, Brooklyn, New York.]

[Illustration: Floor-plan Drawing The Morris Building Company's Block of
Single Houses, with Central Heating Plant, Brooklyn, New York.]

Very probably it will be necessary to enlarge the scope and, perhaps, to
build two stories higher, so that the elders and perhaps bachelors of
both sexes, who do not care for the garden, may help to bear the expense
of the children's playground. Whatever form the advance may take, this is
a sign-post in the right direction.

In the nature of things, however, the first experiments will be costly and
must be combined with business of a sure kind. In this instance the
heating and hot-water supply was made possible by a combination with
factory plant. But if a larger group of, say, one hundred houses were run
by a central establishment, the Morris Building Company estimates the cost
at about fifty dollars per year.

These houses will be referred to again under Chapter VI, but the especial
value of this experiment was its social significance. How much better to
keep desirable land for residential purposes by such means than to permit
families to move away and give up satisfactory dwellings solely because
the lower end of the street has a few foreigners! Our older cities abound
in instances of this quick abandonment of most desirable streets without
any concerted effort to retain their character.

The dangerous sanitary degeneration of these abandoned houses is one of
the worst features of the situation and a prolific cause of the
overcrowding of cities.

The more thoughtful students of progressive tendencies are grouping
themselves in "parks" where houses are put up with the aid of