One hundred and seventy-four delegates attended the first state housing
conference and participated in the organization of the New Jersey State
Housing Association, in the City Hall, Newark, last month. The
conference and the formal organization of the association had its
inception at the National Housing Conference in Philadelphia in
December, 1912, when William L. Kinkead of Paterson and Captain Charles
J. Allen, secretary of the New Jersey Tenement House Department,
gathered the New Jersey delegates and took the preliminary steps which
led to the recent action.
Among the speakers were John A. Campbell, president of the State Board
of Tenement House Supervision; former Governor Franklin Murphy, James
Ford of Harvard University and his brother George B. Ford of Columbia
University, who had just completed an exhaustive survey of Newark, for
the City Plan Commission; Judge Harry V. Osborne, of the Essex County
Court of Common Pleas; Richard Stevens, Miles W. Beemer and others.
The dominant note in the conference was the proposed amendment to the
present Tenement House Law of New Jersey which Professor George B. Ford
referred to as “the best law of its kind in America when enacted in 1901
and not far behind the best laws of its kind at this time.” The
delegates were agreed that the present law should be amended to include
two family houses, many of which it was agreed are in worse condition
than the tenement houses.
Another proposed amendment which practically all the delegates favored
was to require that all tenement houses three stories high be equipped
with fire escapes. The law at present reads that outside iron fire
escapes be provided on all non-fireproof tenement homes more than three
stories in height. It was stated that the enactment of the proposed
amendments would necessitate a considerable increase in the staff of the
Tenement House Department and the delegates pledged themselves to use
every effort to secure a larger appropriation for additional inspectors
and clerks.
In his address Col. Franklin J. Murphy, Jr., called attention to the
fact that the city of New York, with 104,000 tenement houses, spends
$800,000 annually for the tenement house department, or $7.69 per house
per year, while in the last fiscal year New Jersey allowed $51,000 for
the tenement department, with 71,000 houses, or seventy-one cents per
house per year.
The purposes of the association as set forth in the constitution adopted
by the conference are as follows: