Atlanta Daily World

The Better Housing Awakening

RECENT releases disclose that Edward, the Duke of Windsor, former king of England, a gentleman of leisure with no economic worries nor political ambitions, has decided upon a survey of housing conditions in the United States and Germany. It is certain that the Duke could not engage in a more humane or democratic phase of study, touching the masses of the people of the world. The common people by far are in the majority and it will be found that in this country the better housing awakening came late. Seemingly it took this depression with its devastating ill-fortune and human abrasion in general to bring it to pass.

As Mr. Roosevelt has stated so many times, the home is the nursery of the nation. From the home the leaders come. It has been the case in our own country that the strongest men who have made the best contributions, came from the humble ranks of the common people. Pictorial histories of our people are punctuated with the shanty, the log cabin and the fallen-in-farmhouse denoting the birthplaces of many of our great leaders. While humble parentage and birth are no reflections, it is certain that the rude huts and miserable hovels where the flower of our land struggled day and night with poverty are nothing to be proud of or to be retained. Healthy minds and normal growth are enhanced by good environments. In spite of the lack of these many of our great men have been able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps through sheer genius. What has become of that other army, not so favorably and divinely endowed, history will never know.

Many of our people did not inhabit these leaky, creaking and broken down shanties by choice. Their economic conditions and dire poverty forced them into submission. Many of them never had an opportunity through the miserable wage condition to own a home. They have on many occasions been refused the rental of decent quarters. Many of them tried through the ages to acquire a home, but fell by the wayside. Millions have been gobbled up by real estate sharks who sold our people homes on such a basis they could not redeem them.

As an adjunct to the recovery program the federal government went into the better housing business. The slum clearance program in key places over the country is the result. It was argued that the slums were generally made of people who had the slum complex—that if the slums were cleared, these people would seek another slum. This might be true in the case of the lower animals, but not so in every case of the individual. Many things may enter into why many of our people had to accept slum living. Once given their freedom thousands will never go back.

The University Housing Project in Atlanta is an outstanding example of this contention. What was once Beaver Slide, with its shameful huts, mud holes and bootlegging joints is the flower show of the municipality. Every house is a model and the people are proud of them. Many of the inhabitants have learned for the first time what comfortable living comprises. From the object lesson acquired many will go on from the housing project to better homes and more comfortable living.

Such a campaign can never be complete however with the rurals left out. Ever since our advent in this country the rural home has been a place of woeful and criminal neglect. The new lighting system, paved roads and good schools are certain to extend the better housing idea into the rurals where the finest material of the land for leadership has come.

While the survey will find much to criticize, it will be seen that the trial housing projects scattered in the urban centers mark the first real trend of the whole American people from the mud holes of human slavery and the creaking cabins of the pioneer frontier.