Evening Republican, Volume 59, Number 71, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 April 1917 — IS THIS TOWN A WAREHOUSE SUBURB OR NOT [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

IS THIS TOWN A WAREHOUSE SUBURB OR NOT

By HONORE WILLBIE, Editor of the Deli neater. *—- " Two years ago the Delineator started an architectural series which we called The House That Grows. The plan was tp present a house In three stages of growth, each stage being complete and habitable. One could live in the first stage until financially able to add the second, then the third. The idea was to satisfy the American

desire for growth and improvement without sacrificing America’s great need for permanent homes. For the lack of homes is one of Ampricn’s fundamental weaknesses. It goes hand in hand with our lack of family pride, and this breeds inevitably a lack of civic pride. Community pride follows the love of home as surely as fine growth follows rich planting. And community pride dies where there is no community of interests. The great complaint against the average suburban town is that it lacks interest in itself. You can’t get the merchants and the townspeople to cooperate to any extent. And the stores are poor and the suburban population is shifting and unreliable. Doesn’t this apply as well to the towns given over to mail order buying? Do you want your town, the town in which you have started your home, to thrive and improve? Well, it won’t thrive and improve unless the tradespeople in your town are getting and giving a fair deal. Mail order buying turns your town into a suburb of a great city mall order house. It is taking out of your town the life blood, the circulation of which nourishes your home as well as those of your neighbors. It doesn’t pay. That is why I’m glad The Delineator has excluded mail order announcements from the advertising columns. It has removed from our readers’ homes a powerful temptation to buy away from home.