As it was a century ago, so it is today.

‘No Homes Being Built for the Working Class’ by J. Louis Engdahl from the Daily Worker. Vol. 3 No. 75. April 9, 1926.

EVERY American city has its housing problem. The politicians play with this issue, deluding the masses into believing that something will be done to relieve the situation, while the whole horde of profit vultures, from the smallest contractor to the biggest bank, schemes to increase their toll of loot. It is generally admitted, however, by all those who stick to the facts, that housing conditions are getting worse, not better.

Chicago is planning a special Housing Conference for April 16th to confess that the nation’s second largest city is not providing decent places to live for the masses of its wage-earning population.

New York has admitted that tumbledown tenements, condemned as uninhabitable more than half a century ago, are still “doing business at the old stand,” at fabulous rentals. Chicago, as if refusing to be outdone, in a survey of its department of public welfare, proclaims the following:

“Between December, 1914, and June, 1925, rent* in Chicago have increased 105.6 per cent. Wretched, rat infested, wornout houses have practically doubled their rentals in spite of deterioration. And although building operations have been carried on in Chicago on such a scale that the post-war housing shortage has been wiped out, THE SUPPLY OF AVAILABLE HOMES FOR THE SMALL WAGE EARNER HAS NOT BEEN AFFECTED.”

The survey claims that the Negro and the foreign-born workers are the worst sufferers. On Forquer Street, eight Mexicans were found living in two rooms. On another street 15 Mexicans lived in six rooms. More than 10 per cent of apartments visited, “fringing the industrial and commercial districts,” were without windows to the outside air. It is revealed in this survey that large closets and alcoves, or even stair landings had been converted into places for lodging for underpaid workers unable to afford anything better.

The present session of the New York state legislature has been given over in large part to this problem. As usual, however, nothing is being done, except to hold committee hearings, issue voluminous reports and “plans” and to recommend palliative legislation that gets nowhere. Efforts to relieve the situation without curing it have been exposed as futile. The great insurance companies, with billions of resources, have dabbled in the housing problem, only providing apartments for the salaried middle class that is able to pay, never touching the wage-earning masses. The same is true of the “housing scheme” proposed by the labor bankers.

The Chicago survey quotes the recommendation of the 1920 report of the housing committee of the reconstruction commission of the state of New York, offering as a remedy, the community ownership and control of large tracts of land. It is urged that the city could let the land on long term leases to tenants, who would agree to build thereon. But even the American Federationist, the official organ of the

American Federation of Labor, in its current issue, in an article on the bagmaking industry in New York City, admits that labor is paid the mere pittance of $12 per week. Small chance there to set aside more than enough to buy a toy house in a “five and ten cent store.” The revelations incidental to the Passaic mill strike have shown in glaring fashion the crowded, insanitary, disease-breading and even dangerous structures in which workers are housed in the smaller industrial centers.

Profiteering produces these housing conditions. The housing problem cannot be solved without the abolition of profits, which means the wiping out of its parent–capitalism.

This realization must be the stable basis on which the workers must fight as a class against the tumbling roofs over their heads. Militant class action, economically and politically, on the part of the workers against the housing profiteers must be waged most energetically. But only the complete crushing of the profit monster will pave the way for a social order that will attempt to provide workers with homes, one of the most elementary needs.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1926/1926-ny/v03-n075-NY-apr-09-1926-DW-LOC.pdf