Evening star., 1918-07-06

How would you like to pay. say
$500 a year rent for little house
and have the landlord come around
at the end of the year and pay you
10 per cent dividend on your rent?
That is what some thousands OF
British workers enjoy through the
medium of their copartnership tendency
societies.
The scheme is worked this way:
A group of men of good financial
standing and repute form a copart-
nership tendency society and sell
stock therein to investors. The stock
is limited to per cent annual divl-
dend. They buy tract OF land, usu-
ally on the edge of city or where
there is a dema-d for homes, and
build a hundred houses or more al
one operation, incidentally saving
money by the economies OF this Wnole-
sale method. None of these houses
they are offered for rent at about
normal rates.
AS soon as the little community gets
its tenants and gets going 1t easily
earns the per cent to which the
capitalists are limited and has sur
| plus which is used to buy up the sto.k
| from the capitalists. The stock Is d.
yided up among the tenants IN pro-
portion to the amount of rent they
pay as rent dividend. no tenant u u
stock after he has taken enough To
equal the equity on the house he oc-
cupies, and when his rents have thus
retired his share OF the outside
cash Ultimately the private outside
capital is retired altogether ana the
tenants jointly own the association
which owns the town!
What Tenants May Say"
No tenant can say This house is
NINE" but he can say These houses
are ours" When his cousins come
out for a Sunday visit he doesn't
show them merely the kitchen, the
cellar, the bedrooms and a jealously
fenced back yard on a slim iittle
twenty-foot lot; he shows them the
whole town, the park, the playground,
the club, the streets and the various
styles of houses--he is part owner OF
them all, incidentally, he knows his
neighhOrs and cO-operates with them
in getting new tenants.
If circumstances, such as change
of job. compel him to move away, he
is not incumbered by the necessity OF
selling or renting his house. He puts
his stock in his pocket and moves
freely; the company has the burdens
of handling the house, the only string
to his investment being that the COM
pany has the right to buy back that
stock and resell it to tenants so as to
keep the ownership as much as pos
sible in the hands Of residents.
The whole tract being planned all
at once. the town planner and the
architects have full opportunity to do
pretty job. They make curved
streets and closed vistas: they give
color and harmony to the houses; they
lay out the house locations SO that
every house gets floods of sunshine
they provide parks, and play fields
and vegetable gardens-everythin
that the well-to-do suburbanite looks
for in a high-grade real estate deVel-
opment Is here made available for
clerks. mechanics and laborers on a
self-sustaining basis.
Hampstead. one of the largest CO.
partnership tenancy societies, is one
of the sights of London. Here are
little low four and six-room houses
with well kept lawns and English
roses, dotted prettily over an irreg-
ular suburban landscape as far as the
eye can see, in groups of two and
fours. Life is worth living here! Par
ticularly when you contrast this
garden suburb" with the wretched
slums Of London.
societies in Great Britain now, and a
central office which raises the money
for starting many of them and over
sees the plans. Capital now consid-
ers them solid investments Some
$4,000 people live in these copartner-