125. The Housing Problem in capitalist Society.
The privileges of the bourgeois class are more conspicuous in the matter of housing than in any other domain. The bourgeois inhabit the best quarters of the towns. The well-to-do classes live in the best streets, in those which are cleanest, those where there are spacious gardens and plenty of trees. The working class, on the other hand, is in all lands stabled in the mean streets and in suburban quarters. It is not because most of the factories are usually situated in the outskirts of the town that the workers must dwell in the suburbs. Even if a factory is in the centre of a town, those who work there will none the less be herded somewhere in the outskirts. But those factory owners whose works are situated in the remote quarters of the town, themselves live in the centre.
Bourgeois families occupy entire dwellings, or flats with a great number of rooms. Their houses have more rooms than inhabitants. There are spacious gardens, bathrooms, and all the conveniences of life.
Working-class families are crowded into cellars, into single-roomed tenements, into tiny flats. Often enough they live in barrack dwellings, like prisoners who are herded in a gaol. Throughout the day the worker inhales factory smoke, filings, dust of every kind; all night he breathes the air of a room in which as many as five or six children may be sleeping.
It is not surprising that statistics should show how quickly people die in working-class quarters — the folk whose working hours are too long, whose dwellings are too narrow, and whose lives are too short. Here are some of the data. In Britain the average deathrate is 22 per thousand. In the bourgeois quarters, the deathrate is only 17; in the working-class