[Illustration: TENEMENT OF OLD DWELLING TYPE.]
This leads us to the present housing situation in Pittsburgh,--a
situation which should be seen in its right proportions. First, should
be remembered the decades of neglect. The process of cleaning up and
rehabilitation is a ten years' job. The very fact that ordinances
have been passed, a tenement house census taken and fifty thousand
people supplied with sanitary accommodations points the way to the
long, exacting work ahead in devising legislation and enforcing it in
order to bring existing structures up to what may be called the new
Pittsburgh standard. In the second place, the tenement house dwellings
for three or more families are, when all is said and done, but a small
part of the homes of the wage-earning population. The great housing
problem in Pittsburgh is that of the one-or two-family dwelling. Here
is a field where even more exacting sanitary work and regulation must
be done in the ensuing years. In the third place, the mill towns, as
well as the city, present every phase of the evils of bad housing. It
is a district problem, then, for the leaders in Pittsburgh. Finally,
behind all these existing unsanitary conditions demanding regulation,
is the shortage of houses throughout the Pittsburgh District which
will reassert itself with returning prosperity. As a result of the
campaign of last winter, the Bureau of Health is now for the first
time adequately equipped to get at the existing tenement abuses and to
point out the need for more housing accommodations,--new low-rental
houses,--if the work of reducing overcrowding and eradicating disease
breeding quarters is to be carried out on a comprehensive scale.
[Illustration: CLOSET UNDER PORCH SHOWN ON SECOND PAGE FOLLOWING.]
[Illustration: PITTSBURGH.