New-York tribune., 1918-02-10

manity, has become the Boom
Town to which the venturesome find passage
and the passionate pilgrims take their way.
The Washington boom is not like a Johan-
nesburg golconda stampede, Oklahoma
City land rush, or a Detroit cycle-whirl. 1t
is not Seattle boom that hunks three shifts
to bed, wage crowd with calouses on its
hands and mud on it's boots. 1t is laundered
boom and wears spats.
Scarcely less fevcrish and multitudinous,
however, its eager, jostling, dolara-
year, dolar-an-hour and dolar-a-second
throngs, trekking back overland from the
prairies the cotton fields and the lumber
woods, cddying in this new vortex of indus
trial, financial, political and military ac-
tivity
Washington, the dynamic is not without
the accompanments to sudden expansion,
landlord protiteering, real estate speculation.
restaurant shortages, housing crises and the
dscomforts Of mushroom institutions.
The capital grows and groans, spiling over
its old horizon and congestng at its centre,
until, like New York, it begins to seem much
too small for what is demanded of it.
Fifty thousand people having arrived
within the war year. it is now city of over
100000, hard put to live in the houses of
1915. It's streetcar system is overwhelmed
its telephone system is a conundrum, its
Office buildings jammed, its restaurants
are turned into veritable breadlines and its
crowded streets look like the road to the
trenches.
War Spirit at Its Best
The patriotic spirit is at its very best
here, as indeed is the spirit of community
F,;
it is not fraterna. And this "hail-fellow-
wcll-mc camaradere is enhanced by the
discomforts and inadequacies of Washing
toms adaptation to its new housing respon-
sbilities.
Instinct with the spirit OF discovery and
adventure, the new Washington shows a dis
regard for antecedent things and strives
good-humoredy to sort out its comforts from
the jumbled heaps, enjoying those pleasures
of camp fraternizing usually monopolized by
the very poor.
Practically, Washington has adjusted it.
self badly. The growth is forced to become
intensive, rather than expansive. Unlike in
Oklahoma or Chicago, where new claims are
staked on the raw prairie, the WASHINGTON
boom merely revalues the foot-frontace OF
its bed and table spaces. Vacant lots have
no present value whatever, unless open-ai,
sleeping becomes fashionable in the spring
The capital lacks capital. 1t lacks local
initiative. The government has produced
miracles in departmental expansion on Nc
Mans Land. in requisitioned office and apart.
mcnt buildings for administrative purposcs
Shrewd Western industrial magnates take
pans to house man and horse that are asked
to labor on the morrow. And there is ;
government movement here, too to appro
pirate capital for house building.
Washington is renting, or. rather. re
renting proposition, with its temporary non
ulation. Landlordism is made live issu,
by the cessation of building. The monoool,
becomes perfect thing. The johnson bill
to regulate rents in Washington is, of course
the most radical measure ever proposed out
side of the Russian Soviet. Regulating price,
or wages toys with economic relations, bu
regulating rent, interest or profit gets tc
grips with fundamentals.
The real estate men of Washington. in TIL,
midst of the liveliest land boom that tb,
capital has known in this generation. thrns