BREMEN.
107
Wives’ and children’s earnings are reckoned in the above table as
“ subsidiary earnings ” ; there may be included in the case of the former profits
from lodgers, estimated at £4 per annum where only rooms were occupied and
£o where full board was given in addition.
Bremen is not merely a town of small houses, it is also a town of small
owners. While in 1900 only 2*5 per cent, of the inhabited dwellings of Berlin
were owned by their occupiers, and 93*7 per cent, were rented dwellings, 40*3
per cent, of the private houses in Bremen were owned by their occupiers, and 58
per cent, were rented ; the remnant in each case consisted for the most part or
official dwellings. The census of Bremen in that year showed that 25’3 per
cent, of the heads of households belonging to the industrial class lived in their
own homes, while the percentage in the case of workers engaged in trade and
shipping was 27'2. An inquiry made in 1902 of 3,073 workmen of all classes
showed that 631 or 20\5 per cent, owned their houses, while of 144 female
workers interrogated 8 or 5 5 per cent, were house owners. This large number
of small proprietors is explained by two facts, viz., the comparative cheapness
of the Bremen one-family houses of the earlier types, and the credit facilities at
the disposal of provident working-men. It is estimated that the price of a onestorv
single-family house without basement ranges from £200 to £275, of a
similar house partly cellared from £250 to £300, of a similar house with basement
and attic rooms built out front or back from £300 to £350 ; while twofamily
houses with two stories answering to these three types cost from £375 to
£425, from £425 to £475, and from £575 to £625 respectively. Of houses
visited by the investigator one, consisting of two rooms and kitchen downstairs,
and two small rooms upstairs, with garden behind, cost its owner £275, and to
rent it would have cost him £18 per annum ; another with the same accommodation,
cost £200, of which the owner, a harbour labourer with 25&. 10(7. per
week, paid £50 down and borrowed £150 at 4 per cent, interest. In the latter
case interest on purchase money (£8), ground tax (8s.), and repairs (£l), were
equal to a rent of 3s. 8d. per week. The desire to own his house is a powerful
social instinct in the native-born Bremen working-man.
Most of the houses owned by working people have been built by contractors
or Building Societies, and it is seldom that a working man has a house built to
his own plans. Where a man buys from a builder he must pay down a
substantial proportion of the purchase money and obtain the balance from a
bank on mortgage ; where he buys from a Building Society he pays the purchase
money by instalments, conveniently spread over a certain number of years, with
interest seldom exceeding 4 per cent. There are several societies of this kind
in Bremen and neighbourhood. The " Bau und Sparverein ” (Building and
Savings Society) has built a large number of small houses, each consisting of
ground floor and attic, with yard, washhouse, and pig-stye adjacent. A “ Public
Utility ” Building Society has existed at Bremen since 1887, and has done still
more to perpetuate the traditional one-family dwelling, and to encourage working
people to become house owners, though it has been found necessary, in the
interest of cheapness, to build some of the more recent houses for two households.
Since its establishment this society has erected 582 houses, of which
225 have already passed into the hands of tenants, and 15 have been acquired by
the State. An important work has also been done by a Building Society
established at Blumenthal, near Bremen, in the provision of dwelling houses
for employees of the Vulcan Shipbuilding Company and other industrial undertakings.
They are one and two-family dwellings, and to each garden
ground is allotted. U p to the year 190o, the society had built 247 houses
containing 487 dwellings, and the great majority had been sold to their
occupants on the principle of payment by instalments. The dwellings are of
brick, simple in structure, yet ample in size for families of normal size, consisting
of two rooms and kitchen downstairs, and two or three small bedrooms with
storage room above, and so economically have they been built that the purchase
price for the freehold only ranges from £150 for a single house to £230 for a
double one. There has been little building by employers and none by the
municipality. A philanthropic institution known as the Kohlenkampf Stiftung
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