The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-05-28
Partnership Of Dirt And Disease
False Notions of Municipal Economy We Manufacture
 Disease-Price Paid For Our Sums
By LAWRENCE WELLER
 Secretary Director National Housing Association

comes in them fetich, and every public
 expenditure is scrutnlzed most closely, so
 that public officials are loath to take any
 action that imposes upon the electorate
 additional expense.
 The false cry of ''economy'' which is so | popular, and which is usually a cry for l false economy threatens to set back most seriously sanitary and social progress. It is due largely to these conditions that we have in no city dealt effectively with our alley problem. The alley is both a bless ing and a curse. As a means of letting light and air into the interior of city
 blocks, it Is a gain, but generally it is an evil. As minor street hidden away the
 alley becomes the dumping ground for the cast-off material of humanity. The privies are generally close to 1t and surface
 drainage covers the alley with slime.
 Often it is the sole outlook upon life that
 the poor get from the windows of their
 homes.
 The alley must be treated as a street. It must be paved, cleaned, lighted and
 poiced and not left to the dare of the
 abutting property owners. The city must
 assume official responsibility for 1t.
 Tuberculosis Is thought to be about to
 vanish, but sober vision indicates that 1t
 will be years before we see it disappear.
 Although we have been taught that tuber-
 culosis is "house disease which thrives
 In dark unventilated rooms, and that the
 germ cannot live in strong sunlight, yet
 in how few cities is the speculative build CT restrained from adding new dark rooms. In growing western cities where space is plentiful and land cheap, new
 tenement houses are built with half the rooms dark. In no city have we pro- gresed so far as to prohibit in private du-a in md r,,,,1 htti1 yc
 without direct outside light and air
 It seems premature, therefore, to talk of establishing garden cities and "zone systems These ideals. must wait until we can bring ourselves to attend to the elementary principles of sanitation and community living. It is as if the doctor attending a patient desperately i'll with typhoid were to concern himself before the crisis had passed with the patients diet during the convalescent stage.
 Underlying all of these evils is our fail ure to develop sanitary inspection as a vital adjunct of municipal administration In most cities it is still unexplored terri tory. With two exceptions, New York and Chicago, no city in America has as yet evolved a system of inspection worthy of the name. In practically all our health departments we placidly await as we did years ago, citizens complaints, assuming that by attending to these we shall have done all that Is needed With the mass of our working population made up more and more of the peasantry of Europe, ig- norant of our language and customs and living in foreign fcolonies" we can no longer look to any such methods for dis covering and remedying sanitary evils whatever may have been the case when we were a homogeneous nation of Amer ican citizens.
 Many of the poor In our large cities do not know that there is board of health. Even if they know where to find it's offices and can afford the time to travel to them 10 complain, for the great mass are too illiterate to send written complaints they Know from bitter experience that if the source of the complaint is discovered evic- ton by the landlord is sure to follow So the worst conditions remain undisclosed Coupled with inspection to discover san itary evils there should go a system of
 instructive sanitary inspection" by trained won1en.s Though it sounds pater- nalistic, the inhabitants of our large for eign ''colonies" must be taught how to live. They often fail to realize that the methods of waste disposal which were sat isfactory to them in sparsely settled coun- try districts of rural Europe may not be safely followed in our urban communities
 Why should American cities be so far behind the enlightened standards of san itary science? Partly because we have drifted along, choosing the line of least The more Fundamental cause. however, is that we have hitherto not been civilized enough or intelligent enough to be willing to spend money for the pres ervation of health. In hundreds of cities. still, the health commissioner receives no compensation. In every city the health department is terribly undermanned. The health officials have done their part as best they could, but we have been so stupid and careless that although we grant annually large sums for the sup port of police and fire departments to pro- tect property, we have grudged mere pitt tances to our health officers for the pro- tection of human life.