The houses are built along narrow, crooked, and dirty lanes, and the community is without sanitary regulations or oversight. These quarters should be brought under municipal control, the lanes widened into streets and cleaned, and provision made to guard against the opening of similar ones in the future. In the next place, property-owners should build better houses for the Negroes to live in. The weakness in the civilization of the Negroes is most pronounced in their family life. But improvement in this respect is not possible without an improvement in the character and the comforts of the houses they live in.
Bad houses breed bad people and bad neighborhoods.
There is no more distinctive form of crime than the building and renting of houses unfit for human habitation. Scarcely second in importance to improvements in house architecture is the need among Negroes of more time to spend with their families. Employers of Negro labor should be less exacting in the number of hours required for a day's work. Many domestic servants now work from six in the morning until nine and ten o'clock at night. The Southern habit of keeping open shopping- places until late at night encourages late suppers, retains cooks, butlers, and nurses until bedtime, and robs them of all home life.