The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-03-25
1 ] W RE N 5. ARE MAKING.
 TENANT KING.
Frank G. Carpenter Tells of Five-Room Apartments in Berlin at Two Gents Per
 Week-G0od Store at
 S1.25 a Month
By FRANK CARPENTER Special Correspondent The Btrmtng- ham Age-HeraId.

ham Age-Herald.
 Copyright 1923 by Carpenters World
 TravelS)
 BERLIN, March 24.-What rent are you paying for the home where you live? 1 mean your house. apartmen or lodging of one or more rooms? want the figures to show you what you would pay if you lived here in Germany.
 Suppose you have a room or . small aparatment and your rent is thirty dollars month. If you lived here in Berlin you might have the same quarters for less than sixty cents a year. but you would have the heat and light bills to pay.
 Suppose your apartment consists of five of six rooms and you pay fifty dollars. Your rent here would be less than nine cents month, and if you paid one hundred dollars 1t would rise to eighteen cents a month or little over two dollars per annum.
 But you may be nabob with a whole house to yourself or palatial apartment that rents for five or ten thousand dollars year. Men with th~ same taste as you are living in quite as good apartments and houses ing therefor only about eight to six ingtherefor only about eight to six teen dollars for the term of twelve months.
 
 lady whose twelve room apartment faces the Tiergarten on one of the most fashionable streets of Berlin. The house cost several hund. ed dol lars to build, and many of the rooms are twenty feet square. A similar apartment in as good a location in Washington would cost five thousand might cost fifteen or twenty. Her rent is just eight dollars per annum or about seventy cents for each month.
 Fivc-ROOm Apartments At One
 Cent Week.
 l am dictating this to a typist. She has a comfortable five-room apartment with kitchen and an ex- tra room for her servant. The rent for the apartment before the war was 50 month and in and city at least ten dollars more. The typ ist tells me she is paying less than two cents week, and she gloats as she talk of her landlord. She had fight with him the other day be- cause he wanted to raise her twelve cents per annum, rent increase of one cent a month, and she came out victorious as supported by the law and her lease.
 As l laugh she grows quite indig. nant at my sympathy for the owner of the property, saying that the rent is quite fair, for she has to pay her own heat and light bills, which raises her expenses to six or seven dollars per month. She is especially warm about the heat question, saying that coal has so risen that her winter supply will cost forty dollars. laugh again and she indignantly adds that forty dollars means about two mil lion marks, which is the annual in- come or many small clerk 'l Berlin.
 But think of it, you people in our big cities at home, who are paying fifteen dollars anc more for each ton hard coal, and whose monthly rent fo: similar quarters is fifty dollars and upwards instead of eight cents as hers. .he man wFo pays ten dollars month rent in the United States is paying one hundred and twenty-five times as much as my, typist is charged for her comfortable flat She says do not nut the thing rightly, for the earnings of the peo- pie here are in marks and so small they cannot afford more. In the meantime am wondering how. the owner O the apartmer building, which by the way has twenty such flats, pays his taxes and liv- ing expenses out of his total receipts of less than ixteen dollars per year.
 These are some of the conditions which have come as result of the war and the socialistic government which took charge of the republic after the revolution of 1918. That government passed rent laws provid- ing that no rent should be more than double the amount then existing, but