Arizona republican., 1920-01-20
Your Own Rent PrOfiteer

will be done mostly by electricity. Re- frigeration will also be accomplished
 by electricity, so that the tenants will
 not be troubled by the loud and inn patient knocks of icemen at their
 doors. In fact they will not be bothered | with the business of keeping house at
 all. They will have all the ease and
 comfort of it. while the management
 will have all of the responsibilities. Of
 course, they will have the bother of | hiring the management.
 l This particular house is not to be built on the mortgage system. The
 owners are to pay cash. They will live in two thirds of the building and rent the other third, which will provide an income of about $270,000 a year. This
 amount will more than pay the running expenses of the house, so that the owners will be able to live in their apartments for the interest on their investment, thus reducing their rent to about one-t third of the usual price for such establishments.
 Although so popular at present, the
 comparatively owned apartment house
 is not new idea. More than forty
 years ago a group of visionaries, noted
 for their responsibility and impracti-
 cability, conceived the idea as the
 logical way to reduce their rent. It is
 hard to believe, but even in those days
 the matter of rent was causing pro-
 longed grouches and gray hairs: a
 home providing reasonable comforts
 was as far beyond the average income as al present. Then the very poor and
 the very rich were accepting their sta
 tions in life with much greater equa-
 nimity. and usual it was the spectable middle class which was bay- ing the greatest battle with. the hous- ing problem
 This battle was particularly diff cult and irritating for the painters, musicians and writers of the commu- nifty, whose homes were also of neces- sity their workshops. The artist had to have his north light, and the writer and the musician had to have their quiet, and the children of both had to have an agreeable environment So eventually, they got together and planned a sort of dreamy Utopia Cat least so it appeared to their contempo- raries), where each of them would have the kind of 3 home he wanted In other words, it would be coopera- tive. After much discussion, a group of them worked out the plans for sucn a home and decided to risk their sav- ings in it. They were to subscribe fifty per cent of the cost of the land and building, and the remainder was to be provided by mortgage. Each member was to receive stock in pro- portion to his investment, which stock should entitle him to a lease for aD- proximately 100 years on a certain portion of the building. Those who in- vested the most money naturally se- cured the choicest locations.
 Tn addition to the space for their own suites, there was also space for rented apartments, the rent from these being relied upon to pay the operating costs, the interest on the mortgage, taxes and a fund for depreciation While, in the beginning there were a few failures the experiment. proved successful, and since then whole clus- ters of cooperative apartments have sprung up in various parts of the city,
 In a strict sense, they are not CO., operative. and the real cooperatives. including the Cooperative League of America. resent your calling them that It would be more correct perhaps to call them Incorporated, because the CO., operatives insist that no enterprise is truly cooperative unless is control is shared equally by all who share its benefits. But whatever you call them, these new apartment houses are satis- factorily solving the rent question for their owners They are the best method which has yet been found for beating the rent profiteer, and it is interesting to know that anything so profitable l and businesslilxe should have been by few dreamy, tempera- | mental artists.