The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-06-28

crowds into an apartment of one or two rooms and a kitchen.
 What this means may be judged from Berlin statistics. Of 500,00O apartments, 240,000 consist of only one heatable room, with or without a kitchen. Forty-five per cent of the population lives in one-roomed apartments. In these proceeds the whole family life. In apartments with not more than two rooms, live 77 per cent of the population. Two hundred thousand per- sons live six or seven in a room. Even the one-room apartments are not always sacred to a single family. A fifth of the families living in one-roomed apartments take in lodgers Nearly half the apart ments open on to courtyards, mostly so narrow and dark that only the upper story apartments get sufficient light and air. Conditions are aggravated by the absence of a housing inspection law The police intervene only when they hear of very serious violations of hygiene.
 Germany will now take radical meas- ures against these evils. Her methods are three: Firstly, new housing laws; sec ond, campaign by the municipalities against high rents and housing famines; thirdly, the building of workmen's dwell- ings out of public funds. In the first Prussia is leading Before the Prussian diet is Dill which attacks the old system of town planning, and institutes housing inspection on the lines laid down by the British public health act The present rigid system of town planning is to be x-<.f, house building. Hitherto municipalities have often used their restrictive powers to prevent the construction of working class dwellings. Their aim was to att tract rich residents. They took advan- tage of the right they possess to prohibit building altogether, and made their ap- proval conditional on the building of houses with expensive apartments. Prus- sias new housing bill declares that wherever working class houses are needed the municipalities cannot withhold their consent. Years ago Count Posadowsky, who is Germanys chief housing expert, demanded this reform. He described the right to build working class houses freely as ''the workman's charter against mid dle class exclusiveness.''
 Next in Prussia's new housing bill comes great system of inspection. In future every Prussian city with over 100- 900 inhabitants will have to maintain a municipal housing bureau, or to join with neighboring or suburban munich palities to maintain bureau in common. Towns with less than 1Oo,o00 inhabitants will maintain housing bureaux if the local administrative authorities consider it desirable. The new housing bureaux will be managed and staffed by specially trained officials. They will have two main functions. The most important is the inspection of private dwelling houses. The municipal officials will have the right to enter without invitation any dwelling in Prussia except the haisers palaces, the barracks, and other buildings which are already subject to inspection by some public authority. The householder will have to give the officials all information. Well-to-do people dislike this clause. In the few towns where a housing inspection system already exists 1t is confined to small apartments occupied by working men In future the rich also will have to admit the housing inspector.