For Albion Fellows Bacon
Evansville housing reformer, 1865–1933. This page honors her work. County counts from the tool are on Stats.
Albion Fellows Bacon · Evansville
Housing till I die
Albion Fellows Bacon of Evansville (1865–1933) drafted Indiana’s first housing law in 1909. The Assembly cut it back to Evansville and Indianapolis. She formed the Indiana Housing Association in 1911, then won a statewide construction standard in 1913: light, air, water, drainage, and a measure of privacy in multi-family dwellings. In 1917 cities gained the power to condemn houses unfit for human habitation. She wrote the fight down in Beauty for Ashes (1914) and The After-Care of a Housing Law (1917).
She wanted rented houses fit to live in: heat, water, a sound roof, a lock that latches. That fight did not end in 1933. Indiana still counts new units more readily than it keeps the old ones habitable.
Indiana housing, in brief
1909–1917: her bills moved from a city-limited tenement act, to a statewide construction standard, to the power to condemn houses unfit for human habitation. 1930s: federal HOLC maps marked many Black neighborhoods “hazardous,” and New Deal projects such as Indianapolis’s Lockefield Gardens (1938) replaced — and erased — blocks along Indiana Avenue. 1968: the Fair Housing Act banned race discrimination in sale and rental; the older lines are still visible. 2002: the Assembly wrote landlord repair duties into Indiana Code chapter 32-31-8. A tenant generally must give written notice and a reasonable time before a court will hear the case. Indiana still has no general right to withhold rent.
“I had never dreamed that people lived like that in our city.”
“The best of them were cheerless and dismal; the worst of them were sties, where none of us would have housed a pet animal.”
“The slum is not a reproach to the poor, but to the landlords, to the public, to us.”
“I was constantly impressed not only by the amount of preventable illness but of the great amount of misery that was entirely unnecessary and could have been so easily remedied by repairs and better sanitation.”
“This fight would be to win — not all those things I wanted for the poor, not comforts, not conveniences, only bare decencies.”
“Those who need the bill most cannot come. They are sick and weak, poor and ignorant, and they do not know how to protect themselves.”
“The curse of the narrow lot is like the curse of the narrow mind. It fastens upon us the restricted view, the selfish attitude.”
“No, housing reform. Housing till I die. I have made only a good beginning.”
“We can bear with great philosophy the sufferings of others, especially if we do not actually see them.”
“If, in all the cities, every house that is past repairing could be pulled down or burned up, how great would be the crash, how heaven-high the conflagration.”
“We see the poor as a mass of shadow, painted in one flat grey wash, at the remote edges of our sunshine.”
“We have discovered that what we have always thought were just old houses, where poor folks lived, were really slums.”
“Any condition of housing that, in itself, tends to impair the physical or moral health of the tenant, is bad housing.”
“Their most common evil is the lack of water, drainage and sewerage.”
“But an old house is like an old sinner, so much meaner the older it gets.”
“We are learning that to collect rent from our old death-traps of tenements is really to take blood money.”
“The loathsome cesspools and decaying garbage of one neglected house are enough to poison the air and spread contagion to a whole neighborhood.”
“Bad housing affects the entire community, touching the individual, the family, the neighborhood, and corrupting the social and civic life of the whole city.”
“No housing evils are necessary; none need be tolerated. Where they exist they are always a reflection upon the intelligence, right-mindedness and moral tone of the community.”
“Let us make this a nation, not of tenements, but of homes.”
“There are more slums and worse slums in the state than we had expected.”
“Landlords do not have to keep houses in repair in order to get tenants.”
“Detached houses,—little, rickety, wretched,—often conceal conditions as bad as in the tenements.”
“The slum grows quickly and inevitably if left to itself.”
“It is only a question of time in Indiana when our slums will be big enough and bad enough to force legislation. Then it will be too late.”
“Teach them that bad housing is barbarous and out of date, that it is expensive, foolish and inexcusable; that it causes untold suffering and wretchedness.”
“Teach them that every death due to bad housing is a public murder.”