improvements than the one-family house; that it has the advantage of a small garden space, and, finally, they further advocate it because it retains the principle of home-ownership.
The row house, however, has distinct disadvantages as compared with the garden apartment. As noted above, it is much less economical of land than the Bayonne type, which covers 36% of the site area. The row house contains more non-rent paying space. The result is, that the garden apartment gives to the wage-earner a five-room apartment at about the same cost as a four-room row house. This difference between four and five rooms is not 25%, it should be pointed out, but means 50% or 100% difference in bedrooms. The real measure of the standard of living in a home is the number of bedrooms. What gives to the American wage-earner's five and six-room home so striking a superiority over the three and four-room standard of the European worker is the greater number of bedrooms.
The bearing on housing policy of the excessive cost of the row house, as compared with the garden apartment, is not clearly enough appreciated. Under present conditions, when even the garden apartment is beyond the means of the lowerpaid workers, the insistence of many housing experts that the row house is the only solution for wage-earner's housing, seems somewhat arbitrary.
As to the merits of the individual garden of the row house, one may question whether it is not over-rated. The fact is, that many families have neither the desire nor the energy to adopt gardening as a side-issue, and in consequence the garden of the row house often degenerates into the well-known "back yard"—a waste of expensive land, unkempt and obnoxious. The garden can be used only a few months in the year; and, in any case it is no substitute for the second or third bedroom whose cost it equals.
However, the greatest defect of the row house is that it is an inferior type of architecture. This is on account of its deficiencies in daylight and ventilation in the rooms, and because of its monotonous, depressing appearance. As the report of the Committee on Community Planning of the American Institute of Architects for 1925 observes, the row house of the Philadelphia type "was planned to fit the requirements of (the excessively narrow) lots rather than to serve the uses of tenants." The real value of the row house in allowing home-ownership can be offset in the apartment by co-operative ownership. The possibilities of
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