Newspaper Suggests Wise Communities Finance Their Own Homes

There can be no community without homes. Emerson said that one thousand men make a camp; one woman makes a home. There are exceptions, but the rule holds everywhere. No subdivision grows without homes as its foundation. Business and industrial sites are without market until homes are contiguous. All lots increase in value in relation to quantity and quality of homes built. The home is an asset. Yet every home stands for individual initiative and enterprise. The home-builders' venture makes or mars the subdivision. He enriches the community. But the community, as such, contributes nothing financially toward establishing his home asset.

Public utilities become a necessity. Their resources require home consumption and home support. Their existence and support is a community liability. Their failure is deemed a public disgrace. However extravagant their equipment and administration may be, their plants, their product, their upkeep and their dividends come from the homes. The home is the asset.

Neither business nor industry has initial interest in schools, churches or other cultural features. Sometimes they claim exemption from responsibility. Occasionally they are hostile. Their own added populations must be supplied mental, moral and spiritual culture at the expense of the homes. Except in wise and honest administration, the community itself may menace the home in which it made no investment. Special assessments conclerning which the owner had no voice or informatipn puts the home into the delinquent tax list and clouds the title. It must be redeemed at excessive rates. If the community has a right to vitiate the title, with or without reason, it also has right to strengthen and preserve it and all it represents that is valuable to the community. Certainly it dare not become a parasite, feeding upon the vitals of the homes which gave it birth. 'The community can not afford to be a liability which endangers its original resources. It is a good community only when it conserves and promotes the inherent rights of its citizens and of the basic influences in public and private life. The home never ceases to be an asset to be carefully conserved.

Chambers of commerce and promotional interests give financial aid to new industries, furnishing sites or otherriise encouraging them to make local investment. Cooperation is a vital human principal; but it has wider application than to business, nor can it long continue with only one party recognizing it. Advantages received not only justify but demand reasonable response. The citizen who, from personal pride or public spirit, improves his property promotes the good name of his community and advances the welfare of its citizens. But you look long before you find a community as such that has devoted itself to home building as a public industry. Many home builders are stopped for lack of a little money with which to complete this community unit. They assist in building beautiful public buildings at the expense of their own success. A far-visioned community might well incorporate a home-building department in its constructive program. A million dollars, the equivalent of its investment in a public building, could be invested wisely in homes. From five hundred to one thousand homes a year could be completed with an addition of one or two thousand dollars to the resources of good citizens who are building modest homes. As a rotary fund, with stated repayments, a home program could be maintained from year to year.

This would not be a cure-all. It would be subiect to abuse both in administration and in borrowing, just is public buildings too frequently prove to be excessive.investments; but it would furnish mental and financial relief to people who are adding stability to government by building on its foundations.

-Beverly Hills (California) Citizen.