belt" and in three on the West Side. The blocks on the South Side chosen for investigation were the three bounded by Dearborn Street, Twenty-seventh Street, Armour Avenue, and Thirty-second Street. These blocks are in the poorer section, close to the tracks; they are farther south than the district of segregated vice, but it is hardly possible that the residents of these blocks can escape its influences.1

The blocks chosen on the West Side were the three bounded by Fulton and Paulina streets, Carroll Avenue, and Robey Street. These lie in a neighborhood which has a large number of old houses whose owners and agents, awaiting the inroads of the manufacturing district, have declined to make extensive repairs, and white and colored alike have been making use of houses ill-suited either for lodging-houses or for small flats. Here also an effort was made to choose blocks as indicative as possible of the situation over a large area. The families in these blocks are probably more nearly normal than those in the South Side blocks, for the influence of the district of segregated vice has been less distinctly felt.

For the colored families who are able to move out of such districts as these, the situation is difficult enough. If a man wishes better influences for his growing children than the South State Street saloon or cheap amusement place provides, he can sometimes get an apartment in a better neighborhood, or sometimes even buy property, secretly, or through a friendly white man. Then, though he may have to live with almost no fellowship of his own kind for years, he will have improved his children's surroundings. But for the colored families who cannot afford to move away from such districts as these, the situation is far more difficult; even the fundamental matter of health must be disregarded in the problem of making both ends meet; tenants have neither the money nor The report of the vice commission of Chicago emphasizes this fact: “The history of the social evil in Chicago is intimately connected with the colored population. Invariably the larger vice districts have been created within or near the settlements of colored people. In the past history of the city, nearly every time a new vice district was created down town or on the South Side, the colored families were in the district, moving in just ahead of the prostitutes. The situation along State Street from Sixteenth Street south is an illustration." "Any effort to improve conditions in Chicago should provide more wholesome surroundings for the families of its colored citizens who now live in communities of colored people." See "The Social Evil in Chicago," pp. 38, 39.

the influence to bring about necessary changes and improvements; they must take these old, dingy, frequently broken-down houses and endure the consequences with small hope of being able to better their condition. It is for these families, in the poorer neighborhoods, that the question of housing conditions is of foremost importance.

The two districts chosen were known to differ in the character of the population, a difference which shows at once in Table I.

In the South Side blocks which have a nearly homogeneous population, 94 per cent of the heads of families are colored; while on the West Side only a little over one-third are colored, and the remaining two-thirds represent sixteen different countries and nationalities. The South Side Negro lives in a Negro community, while the West Side Negro may live next to an Irishman or a German and sometimes in the same house with him. Here the white man can get advantages or improvements for his house which the Negro cannot obtain; while on the South Side, the almost solid Negro blocks have equal advantages, or equal lack of them. This difference between the two sections in the composition of the population goes far to explain some of the differences in the minor characteristics of the two neighborhoods, and the fact that several of the peculiarities of the first neighborhood are less marked in the second.

In the South Side district for example, the number of children is remarkably small. There are less than one-half as many children as lodgers. The lodgers constitute in fact 31 per cent of the total block population.

The West Side district shows the characteristics of a more nearly normal group, namely, a smaller proportion of lodgers, and a larger proportion of children. In the district which was investigated in South Chicago,' which showed a population mainly Polish, children formed nearly a third of the population. Here, on the South Side, they form only a little more than a tenth, and on the West Side a little more than a fifth. The explanation is far from simple. The economic and social pressure of modern life may have forced down the birth-rate among the Negroes as it has among the native-born whites; or it may be that a high death-rate, due in part to the conditions under which the colored people are forced to live, accounts for the small number of children in the families.

The high percentage of lodgers, 31 per cent on the South Side and 14 per cent on the West Side, is significant when compared with such districts as the Bohemian and the Polish, where only 5 and 4 per cent of the population were lodgers. Only in two other districts investigated, those near the Stockyards and in South Chicago, where in each case more than a fourth of the group were lodgers, were such high percentages of lodgers found.

The houses in the colored blocks are often low, one or two-story

See American Journal of Sociology, XVII, No. 1, p. 150.

buildings. On the whole there is a considerable amount of vacant space in the lots. One-half of the lots in both districts had less than 50 per cent of their space covered. Instead of the small irregular paved courts, such as one sees in the Polish section on the Northwest Side, these houses often have fairly large back yards, sometimes with grass and shrubs growing in them. The yards are almost always dirty and disfigured by rubbish, but at least they afford more air space than if they were crowded with buildings. In all of the foreign districts except South Chicago, which is, of course, of comparatively recent growth, the buildings are crowded more thickly upon the lots; here the property-owners are not making improvements, or utilizing the land space either by extending old buildings or by building new ones.

The colored people in these districts do not to any great extent live in large tenement houses. The houses are small, and some of them, with their boarded-up porches and shaky board walks, resemble the Negroes' cottages in small villages. Here, too, the windows are sometimes filled with plants, and sometimes a straggling vine has been trained over a porch, but the Negro's taste for beauty can usually find little with which to gratify itself in these dingy sections.

The houses are usually frame, and as a rule have only two stories. Some of them were intended for two-family houses, but others were plainly built for single dwellings, and have been converted into two-flat houses regardless of the fact that they are not fitted for

The following table shows the percentage of lot covered in both districts:

two families. A large number of them are "front" houses, that is, open directly upon the street. Out of the 209 buildings on the South Side, only 4 were on the middle of the lot and 21 at the rear and out of 131 on the West Side, 3 were on the middle of the lot and 14 at the rear. The few alley houses have probably been moved back from the street when new houses were built in their places. The rooms in such houses are usually poorly lighted and ventilated; the houses are much more dilapidated than the front houses; sanitary provisions are often inadequate; and the alley and ground

around the house are usually disfigured with rubbish and refuse. The mere passer-by in the colored districts is impressed with the dilapidation of the buildings. Outside stairways and porches seem to be almost falling apart. The house-to-house canvass showed the houses to be conspicuously out of repair in other respects also. The following table shows that on the South Side 52 houses or 25 per cent of the whole were in bad repair, and on the West Side 41 houses or 31 per cent of the total number, were in bad repair. The following table shows the number of houses occupied by one or more fami