In the book How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, Jacob describes in his book on the systems of tenants of housing had failed due to greed and neglecting wealthier people. Also he shows that a correlation between the high crime rate, drunkenness and reckless behavior from the poor and it also shows that they lack of owning a proper home. It mostly focuses on slum conditions of the lower East side of Manhattan, where many immigrants like Jews, Italians, Chinese, Germans, and Irish were packed in tenements. Many of them had no windows, no ventilation, and tried to prevent overcrowding, crime, diseases, filth and most of all poverty. He also exposes the kind of conditions poor people live in.
The Industrial Revolution began in England in the 1700’s within the textile industry. The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes by using different machines. Before the Industrial Revolution people made different things by hand or simple tools. For example, people wove textiles by hand, and after the Industrial Revolution machines were used instead. The Industrial Revolution began in England because of many reasons.
Most immigrants went straight to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and rented very small rooms or even just a bed for around fifty cents to a dollar a week. These people were called boarders or lodgers. Usually there were around five large families in a decent size in every tenement house, and there was very little sanitation or extra room. To the rest of America, this wasn’t even a known problem until in 1890; Jacob Riis published “How the Other Half Lives”, featuring pictures of tenement houses and city streets. This book brought to light the real struggle of immigrant life in the early 1900s.
Because so many people were forced to live in one common area, the buildings would be inflicted with unsanitary conditions. These included poor plumbing and a lack of running water. Larson referenced the fact that people in the community would dump waste into the city’s water supply, which contributed to the spread of sickness and disease and went untreated because of limited access to healthcare. The city’s insufficient sanitation systems led to diseases like Typhus and Cholera running rampant through the city, infecting many.
The 17th America was a farmland. People were poor and some migrated to this country in the hope of quick wealth. Individuals from England and Europe began to migrate to America. The book gives a detailed account of the first houses, or rather huts which have been built in America.
During the 19th century, the American people were experiencing a revolution concerning both the economy and religion, in what is recognized today as the Market Revolution and the Second Great Awakening. A rapid increase in the population within the countryside, and the development of new technology outburst a change in the economy from one of local exchanges to one governed by capital and capitalists. Family owned businesses began to expand and sold their items not only among a small community, but now products were being shipped to different ports along the colonies. The industrialization movement was rapidly approaching that “Indian removal was necessary for the opening of the vast American lands to agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to
.they have neither gutters nor drains . . .the refuse accumulates in stagnant stinking puddles . . . [tenements are] a crowded . . . chaotic group of little one-story, one-room cabins,” (Engels). Engels wrote that each town had at least one slum area with overcrowded and chaotic three-story houses, garbage and sewage on the unpaved, filthy streets, and trash that polluted the air and caused it to smell foul.
( page 387 lines 140-144 ). Not only was the rent high, the living space of this colored family was not comfortable. These people had to live in very small places, because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. The difference between the tenements and the
Most working-class people lived in apartment buildings called tenements where they could only afford small, usually old and dilapidated housing. In many instances an entire family would be crowded into a single room to live together, as evidenced of a historical photograph of a working-class family in their apartment. Seven people are together in a single room, including several young children (Document V). Without enough money to afford adequate and safe housing, families in tenements such as this one would be uncomfortable and burdened by domestic responsibilities as well as long hours at jobs. The close proximity of so many people meant disease could spread rapidly through the building and the rest of the community.
As the population kept increasing, families from different countries would travel over to find the rest of their family members and congregate together in the same housing units. This trend created communities that were primarily composed of people of the same ethnicity which gave rise to nicknames like “Chinatown” and “Jewtown” for these specific areas. These areas attracted more and more people from the same ethnic background which furthered the degree of overcrowding. The rapid growth of New York is ultimately what led to the poor conditions of the tenements. Riis described the over crowdedness of the tenements certain disgust saying, “something like forty families are packed into five old two-story and attic houses that were built to hold five.”
A huge number of migrants and battling agriculturists filled urban communities, for example, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Chicago, searching for work and hurrying the urbanization of America. By 1900, around 40 percent of Americans lived in real urban communities. Most urban areas were caught off guard for quick populace development. Lodging was constrained, and apartments and ghettos jumped up across the country. Warming, lighting, sanitation and restorative care were poor or nonexistent, and millions kicked the bucket from preventable infection.
Paragraph 1: Industrialization really took of in the United States during the late 1800s and the early 1900s. Before then, America 's population had mostly lived out in the farms and ranches of the country, but that was about to change when more and more people started to move to the cities for work. Most of the people that moved, found themselves in factory jobs for the steel industry or alike, or working for the railroads. Companies could really thrive, as the United States government, adopted a policy of Laissez Faire. This is also about the time that immigration really kicked up, more and more immigrants were showing at Ellis Island, looking for a new start.
The houses were also shared often with two or three families in a single room; the close quarters led to the rapid spread of diseases amongst the residents of the tenements. These poor living and working conditions were the dirt behind the golden covering of America. Although life might have been better than other countries, the American Dream was not as astounding as it was
“Public housing was not originally built to house the ‘poorest of the poor,’ but was intended for select segments of the working class (United States 1937; Bauman 1987; Atlas and Dreier 1992; Marcuse 1995). Specifically, it was designed to serve the needs of the ‘submerged middle class,’ who were temporarily outside of the labor market during the Depression.” wrote J.A. Stoloff in “A Brief History of Public Housing”. Stoloff sought to explain the true foundation of public housing, in it being primarily focused on middle class families whose economic status had been decimated by the Great
The Industrial Revolution began over 200 years ago. It changed the way in which many products, including cloth and textiles, were manufactured. It is called a "revolution" because the changes it caused were great and sudden. It greatly affected the way people lived and worked. This revolution helped to bring about the modern world we know today in many ways.
