In 1870, Riis emigrated to the United States and spent the next years wandering the northeastern part of the country. He didn 't have a stable job so when he obtained a job as a police reporter for the New York Tribune his life turned around. He took a position with the Evening Sun, then through his newspaper work he became closely familiar with New York 's poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. In the 19th century, he started exposing the life of the lower class in New York city. In How the other half lives by Jacob Riis, he discusses how the half that was on top really didn 't care much about other than themselves and how the poor suffer.
In Jacob Riis’ revolutionary book How the Other Half Lives, Riis details the atrocious conditions of the tenements in New York City at the turn of the century. Riis particularly focusses his initial chapters on the formation of the tenements and their subsequent demise into filthy ruins. In many ways, these tenements paralleled the federal housing projects of the 1950’s. Both populations predominately included impoverished, working class immigrants and minorities. However, the tenements and the projects differ in terms of supportive communities.
In Down These Mean Streets, Piri Thomas informs the reader about the challenges his family had to overcome in Harlem, New York. Four siblings, a mother, and father all cramped up in an apartment with no proper heating, with drug addicts as neighbors, and an unsafe environment out in the streets which required constant police patrol. Thomas narrated a time during the early 1940s when he ran away from home at the age of 12. He observed a policeman ignore his situation for the sole reason as Thomas mentioned, “After all, a twelve-year-old kid walking the streets at 3 a.m. was a nothing sight in Harlem” (Thomas 6). In other words, the living environment in Harlem had to be so dangerous that seeing a kid in the streets at night was a gift for police
Jacob Riis’s books change the life of the poor. Riis brought into light, the worst of the worst. These horrible conditions were never talked about or mentioned by anyone in the mass public until Riis’s book was published. Not only were his descriptions horribly real and detailed, but his photographs
How the Other Half Lives is a book written by Jacob Riis that tells readers about the living conditions and vocational options to distinct ethnic groups in the late 1800s. The Jewish, African-Americans, and Chinese all lived in New York City but all faced different problems and seemed as if they lived in different parts of the world. Chasing the “American Dream” was a different experience for all of these ethnic groups. Life in the 1800s was without a doubt very complicated, but in my opinion, these three ethnic groups had it the worst.
Jacob Riis in “How the Other Half Lives” is about the squalor that characterizes New York City’s working class immigrant neighborhoods. He describes deplorable conditions of these immigrants by providing specific examples, relaying them through quotation and images alike. Riis comments on the injustices that the residents of the tenements faced on a regular basis. So, with his attention to detail, Riis provided the contemporary reader with unsettling images of the poor and marginalized along with a few examples of the benefits of reform and reorganization in the poorer communities, to the benefit of residents. Another observer, Richard T. Ely, in “Pullman: A Social Study” writes about the community of Pullman, Illinois located in the suburbs of Chicago.
Another known muckraker Jacob Riis published his book,“ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York.” This book consolidated content with photographs to deliver a genuinely aggravating photo of the living states of the poor in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His book prompted to apartments being torn down and upgrades being made to the range including the working of sewers and the usage of garbage collection. Jacob Riis attacked the miseries of the poor who suffered the degradation of living in miserable slum areas without a proper water supply. He worked not only for the abolition of rear tenements but for playgrounds for children, for small parks, for the abolition of child labor (231).
Evicted is a book that tells of America’s very real problem of poverty. Matthew Desmond gives readers a detailed image of the lives of eight people who are struggling to live in some of the poorest of neighborhoods in Milwaukee. The characters in this book speak for themselves and we get to witness firsthand their attempt to rise above poverty and fight against a system that profits off of them being poor. The characters struggle to afford places that many would consider uninhabitable. Eventually, they get evicted when they succumb to multiple problems that are a factor of their surroundings.
How the Other Half Lives is a book written by Jacob A. Riis during the Progressive era. In the book Riis writes about all the different religions, races, and ethnicities in the early tenements and the streets of New York. Riis mostly talks about the lower class, and how In Riis”s words the purpose of this book is “I have aimed to tell the truth as I saw it. If this book shall have borne ever so feeble a hand in garnering a harvest of justice, it has served its purpose.”
The novel, The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky is about how he traveled the United States meeting the poor. The stories he introduces in novel are articles among data-driven studies and critical investigations of government programs. Abramsky has composed an impressive book that both defines and advocates. He reaches across a varied range of concerns, involving education, housing and criminal justice, in a wide-ranging view of poverty 's sections. In considering results, it 's essential to understand how the different problems of poor families intermingle in mutual reinforcement.
In an age where industrialization, wealth, and the desire to gain material progress ruled the American social rankings, Jacob Riis did not hesitate to expose the other end of the spectrum. While middle and upper class Americans were sitting pretty with their superior statuses and wealth, the lower class was overworked and underappreciated. By working as a newspaper reporter, social reformer, and photographer, the Danish immigrant effectively portrayed the lives of the other half: those living in the slums of New York (Editors). The famous muckraker, or pre-WW1 scandal hunter, opened the eyes of the upper classes and brought attention to the terrible conditions of the impoverished immigrants. Working as both a journalist and police reporter
Matthew Desmond’s Evicted takes a sociological approach to understanding the low-income housing system by following eight families as they struggle for residential stability. The novel also features two landlords of the families, giving the audience both sides and allowing them to make their own conclusions. Desmond goes to great lengths to make the story accessible to all classes and races, but it seems to especially resonate with people who can relate to the book’s subjects or who are liberals in sound socioeconomic standing. With this novel, Desmond hopes to highlight the fundamental structural and cultural problems in the evictions of poor families, while putting faces to the housing crisis. Through the lens of the social reproduction theory, Desmond argues in Evicted that evictions are not an effect of poverty, but rather, a cause of it.
Mantsios’ compares the profiles of different Americans lifestyles in his text and develops the idea that an individual’s class standing can affect their livelihood in detrimental ways, “The lower one’s class standing, the more difficult it is to secure appropriate housing, the more time is spent on routine tasks of everyday life, the greater is the percentage of income that goes to pay for food and other basic necessities, and the greater is the likelihood of crime victimization” (293). Mantsios explains that one’s class standing can affect the chances of survival and success. Ehrenreich describes her own housing experiences as a low income worker. To reduce her overall costs and to obtain a second job, Ehrenreich moves closer to Key West. Ehrenreich has just enough money to pay the rent and deposit on a tiny trailer at the Overseas Trailer Park.
More than sixty-five percent of New York’s population lived in those tenements. Tenements were a large source of suffering for new immigrants and their families. This is mainly due to their unsanitary and overcrowded conditions. The tenement conditions were horrendous and appalling.
During 1980’s, much racism and indifference to adversity openly ruled in places such as Chicagoan slums. Children aged untimely, stripped of their youthfulness, happiness, and ambitions. This distinct social injustice became very apparent in Alex Kotlowitz book “There Are No Children Here” through his successful application of figurative language, powerful expression, and appeals to emotions and logics. To readers, now the question become is whether to continue to turn a blind eye to the uncomfortable conditions of the poverty-stricken or to intervene in improving their cause to restore balance in
