308 
LEIPZIG. 
doorway which gives admission to each front house, and is large enough to 
permit the passage of a fire-engine from the street to the back houses if 
necessary. 
Passing from the consideration of the tenement houses to that of the 
tenements themselves, there is found to be little if any variation of type. 
In respect to the number of rooms of which their dwellings most frequently 
consist, the working classes of Leipzig are more favourably situated than those 
of any of the other large cities included in the present inquiry, except Bremen, 
which occupies among German towns the unique position of having the one- 
family house as distinguished from the tenement system of housing. Among 
all the towns visited, in which the tenement system of housing prevails, Leipzig 
is the only one in which working-class families were found to be most frequently 
occupying so many as four rooms. The evidence in support of this figure is 
partly statistical and partly based on local expert opinion. It may be well to 
note here that the official housing statistics hitherto published by the Municipal 
Statistical Office afford no safe basis for conclusions as to the number of rooms 
which usually constitute a dwelling, for in these, as in the corresponding 
statistics of most other German municipalities, the heatable room only has been 
treated as the unit of housing accommodation, and other habitable rooms have 
been neglected. In the housing census undertaken in Leipzig in December, 
1905, however, all habitable rooms have been counted, and the examination of 
the whole of the schedules for two typical working-class districts, kindly 
undertaken for the purposes of this report by Professor Dr. Hasse, the director of 
the Statistical Office showed the following results :— 
Number of Rooms in Dwelling. 
District Schleussig 
(Western Suburb). 
Number of Working- 
class Dwellings. 
District Neuschönefeld 
(Eastern Suburb). 
Number of Working- 
class Dwellings. 
Both Districts together. 
Number of Working- 
class Dwellings. 
One room 
Two rooms 
Three rooms 
Four rooms 
Five rooms 
Six rooms 
Total 
8 
30 
159 
333 
84 
11 
625 
20 
20 
272 
341 
47 
4 
28 
50 
531 
674 
131 
15 
704 
1,429 
It is seen from the above that of the 1,429 typical working-class dwellings 
dealt with, 074 (the largest group) consisted of four rooms. It is important 
to add that in all the tenements to which this Table relates the whole of the 
rooms were occupied exclusively by the family, none being let to lodgers. 
The preponderance of the four-roomed tenement as a working-class 
dwelling is also shown by returns furnished for purposes of the present inquiry 
by 195 workmen’s families, stating, inter alia, the number of rooms occupied. 
Of these 195 families 120 were renting four-roomed and only 58 three-roomed 
tenements. Though limited in scope the data obtained through these two 
independent channels afford adequate confirmation of the opinions previously 
expressed by representative workpeople, and by an official of over 30 years’ 
experience of housing conditions in Leipzig, as to the predominance of the 
four-roomed tenement. 
Each of the four or five storeys of any working-class tenement house 
contains, as a rule, either (a) three tenements of 4 rooms each ; (6) two 
tenements of 4 rooms and one of 3 rooms, or (c) two tenements of 4 rooms. 
A feature common to all modern houses, working-class or other, is the 
provision of a separate vestibule or corridor for each tenement—a convenience 
to which great importance is attached. It would seem, however, as if, in a 
three- or four-roomed dwelling, an unduly large proportion of the total 
available space is sacrificed for the sake of this outward sign of " gentility,” 
with the result that the kitchen and one of the bedrooms are invariably very 
small. The height of the rooms is usually three metres, or about 10 feet.