Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives Summary

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. As Bauman et. al. argue in their essay “Public Housing, Isolation, and the Urban Underclass”, the federal public projects systematically disrupted the formation community by forbidding extended kin

After discussing the abhorrent conditions of the tenements, Riis adds that the “steady working up” of tenants gives reason to believe “that the world is, after all, growing better, not worse,” albeit not fast enough because of the cruel tenement conditions (Riis 24). Riis then offers several specific examples of role models who epitomize this “steady working up” (Riis 24). For instance, Riis describes an Italian who grew up in the tenements as a mere scavenger, but now controls the “corner fruit stands” while his son “monopolizes the bootblacking industry” (Riis 25). Thus, even residents with initially undesirable jobs can arise from poverty and build better lives for themselves. To the contrary, public housing policy “dismantled the frail, but vital, structure of opportunity” instrumental to the very “survival of families” in destitute slums (Bauman et. al. 284). Without this opportunity, project residents could not ascend the social ladder. As Bauman et al. note, the projects unintentionally banned potential role models through their rigorous enforcement of the maximum income rule (Bauman et. al. 284). On the other hand, tenant owners, who Riis describes as solely focused on building “larger and larger tenements”, did not care about the wealth of the residents (Riis 10). So, tenant residents benefitted from figures such as the Italian man and

After all, architects typically constructed the projects to include a diverse possibility of uses, while tenements merely sought to maximize tenants. Bauman et. al. describe the Richard Allen Homes as matching the style of the surrounding North Philadelphia buildings and featuring “a community building, housing management offices, workshops, a nursery, an auditorium, and grassy courts planted with trees and shrubbery” (Bauman et. al. 274). One project resident even remarked that she “dared anybody to find a spot of dust” in the kitchen (Bauman et. al. 274). In the tenements, it was hard not to find dust. One well-known physician likened the tenement air to “breathing mud” (Riis). Tenements, Riis, describes, included “[c]razy old buildings, crowded rear tenements in filthy yards, dark, damp basements, leaking garrets, [and] shops” (Riis 15). Thus, while the projects included copious facilities for their residents to use, the tenements solely featured dirty living spaces and the occasional shop. Additionally, projects adhered to stricter standards of cleanliness which made the projects more sanitary than the tenements. Project rules required tenants sweep the floors and clean their rooms, subject to occasional inspections (Riis 16). Combined with the controlled populations of the projects, this resulted in few outbreaks of disease, at least none of which