The Silent Crisis on Everett's Sidewalks
A local labor leader details the quiet desperation of forty idle carpenters as the city's housing and employment market hits a wall.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Why, I could go down any street with any old bait and get a string of carpenters that would do credit to any veteran angler in the best trout streams. The question should be reversed: Where can a carpenter find work? We are waiting for something to turn up; something which has been promised since the dawn of the year. Waiting while the grocery bills have swallowed up the surplus savings; waiting while the rent bill climbs up and forces us to move into smaller, cheaper and meaner quarters; waiting while the worry plows deep furrows and disease creeps into the system of underfed wife and children. Truly, something is wrong with the system or the number of enforced idle days would not total up to nearly four million in a year in the United States by men able, willing, and anxious to work. If any of my readers know of any place which offers a better chance than Everett, and cannot get away to accept such position, it may be that someone now uselessly wearing out our sidewalks would like the chance. There are now about forty carpenters idle here, and more coming.
“Waiting while the rent bill climbs up and forces us to move into smaller, cheaper and meaner quarters.”
This 1910 account of construction workers squeezed by rising rents and lack of work eerily mirrors the modern Everett housing crisis, where the very people who build the city often cannot afford to live within its limits.
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