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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 16. Income, Consumption and Housing - 6. Housing Conditions
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Chapter i6. Income, Consumption and Housing 377
hold in the country. Yet the farm houses are smaller on the average than
in any other farm region except in the Mountain states where they are just
as small.®® This means, of course, that there is more over-crowding in the
farm regions of the South than in any other farm region. Such over-
crowding particularly hits the large families of which, in the Negro group,
the majority seems to be more or less suffering from cramped housing
conditions.^®
Concerning housing conditions in Southern villages there are compara-
tively few studies j
yet we know that the race differentials are enormous.
Just to take an example: more than three-fourths of the Negro village
families in the sample for the Consumer Purchases Study were without any
indoor water supply 5
the proportion of such families in the white group was
15 per cent. Two-thirds of the large Negro village families—as against 28
per cent of the white families—^were living in homes with more than 1.5
persons per room.^^
Southern cities, just Jike Southern rural areas, have, in general, much
worse housing conditions than other sections of the country.**^ Negroes
are much worse off than are whites both in Northern and in Southern cities.
It even happens that nonreliej Negro families may suffer from certain
specific deficiencies to a greater extent than do white reltej families. Accord-
ing to the National Health Survey, this was true, for instance, in respect
to the frequency of cases where there is no private toilet for each dwelling
unit so that two or more residential households have to share one toilet.
In one group of Northern cities (Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and St.
Louis) 27 per cent of the Negro relief households and 21 per cent of the
Negro nonrelief families were living under such conditions. The corre-
sponding figures for white relief families and for white nonrelief families
with an income of less than $i,000 were 13 and ii per cent, respectively.
There were similar race differentials in other groups of Northern and
Southern cities. The proportion of families with private inside flush toilets,
likewise, was higher among white relief families than among Negro non-
relief households.*^® The sample for urban nonrelief families in the Con-
sumer Purchases Study indicates similar conditions for different income
classes.**’^
These findings are certainly significant. Urban Negro housing is poorer
than even the low income status of the Negroes would enable them to buy.
This may be due to the fact that, at least in Southern cities and villages,
Negroes, even at a given income level, spend less money on housing than do
whites. It seems, however, that there is another and even more fundamental
cause: the artificial limitation in the choice of housing for Negroes brought
about by residential segregation.®
*A discussion of residential segregation is given in Chapter *9, Section 3. See, also, the
section on housing policies (Chapter 15, Section 6).
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