How the Other Half Lives

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1890

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Themes

The Consequences of Greed

Riis regards greed as both the primary cause of the tenement problem and the most formidable obstacle blocking reform.

If the working impoverished people in the tenements have “plagued” the city with alcohol addiction, crime, and a host of other evils, then this plague amounts to “a just punishment upon the community that gave it no other choice” (3). The problem dates to earlier in the century, when “the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors” (8). Riis notes that in some places, to maximize profit, 10 families occupied spaces built for two. People who are impoverished “have no other place to live” and are enslaved to “exorbitant rents” (23). In the downtown tenement districts, south of 14th Street, tenants occupy once fashionable houses that have been converted to their present purpose, which is “to shelter, at as little outlay as possible, the greatest crowds out of which rent could be wrung” (29). In the “Bend” and elsewhere, the Italian tenant “submits to robbery at the hands of the rent-collector without murmur” (48).

Old World memories linger, and the plunder of tenants “has come near to making the name of landlord as odious in New York as it has become in Ireland” (64). One wealthy owner of three disreputable seven-cent lodging houses, where boarders sleep on cots with no pillows or blankets, clears $8,000 per year, which equates to more than $250,000 in today’s money. The tenements also feature the equivalent of forced labor. In tenement sweatshops, the “sweater” takes care to “smother every symptom of awakening intelligence in his slaves” (122). “Jewtown” lodgers pay “extortionate rents” (133). Further uptown, Riis encounters cigarmakers laboring for a “landlord-employer” who rents “three rooms for $12.50” but only “if two be dark, one wholly and the other getting some light from the front room” (142-44). Here the Czech family must “shorten rations to pay the landlord” (146). On the West Side, landlords commit “systematic robbery” by claiming that “colored tenants” devalue property, and by this reasoning the landlords justify raising rent (151).

Indeed, the tenements are the result of “ill-spent wealth” on the part of landlords looking to “earn a usurious interest” at the tenants’ expense (265-66). Reform has come slowly, in part because the worst of the landlords, many of whom are absentees, are “ready and bound to fight to the last” for their “private rights” (270).

Tenements as Locus and Source of New York City’s Social Ills

Riis blames the tenements themselves, not the people who inhabit them, for the appalling conditions in which New York City’s working impoverished population is forced to live and for the spread of dangerous vices that flourish in such conditions.

Riis’s book is a study of “How the Other Half Lives,” and how the “boundary line of the Other Half lies through the tenements” (2). Notwithstanding the reformers’ best efforts, “in the tenements all the influences make for evil” (3). Only in the tenements does one find “the dark bedroom, prolific of untold depravities” (8). Health officials find that some tenants even resist reform, for they have “sunk, after a generation of unavailing protest, to the level of their surroundings, and [are] content to stay there” (15). If there happens to be a decent tenement surrounded by squalor on all sides, it will not long remain decent, for “the worst houses exercise a levelling influence upon all the rest” (17).

Tenements both dominate the landscape and effectively dictate the quality of life in each community. In “Jewtown,” Riis observes an “endless panorama of the tenements” that stretches “as far as the eye reaches” (119). Tenements also conceal forced labor, as in the Czech quarter, for instance, where the “landlord-employer, almost always a Jew, is frequently of the thrifty Polish race” (136). In the “[B]lack colonies” of the West Side, Riis finds evidence that the Black citizens have experienced a “second emancipation” thanks to the pressure of foreign immigration and the Black New Yorker’s “cutting loose from the old tenements” (150). Among their many vices, tenements “have no aesthetic resources” (163).

The human toll is the greatest sin of all. In the worst tenements, hundreds “are every day slowly starving to death” (170). Whereas complacent or judgmental observers might conclude that alcohol addiction lay at the root of most social ills in the tenements, Riis sees alcohol addiction as a symptom of despair brought on by the tenements themselves, which bear the “heaviest responsibility” for the tenants’ vices (172). The saloon “projects its colossal shadow, omen of evil wherever it falls into the lives of the poor,” but it is also “the one bright and cheery and humanly decent spot to be found” in or near the tenements (210).

Indeed, the children and young people are the tenements’ worst and most innocent inhabitants. A small “army of twenty-five thousand” orphaned infants appearing at the Foundling Orphanage in the last 20 years shows that “the instinct of motherhood even was smothered by poverty and want,” for, Riis believes, “[o]nly the poor abandon their children” (186). Those who survive are quickly molded by their surroundings. To anyone who regards as hopelessly “savage” the wild young boys who come of age in the tenements, Riis advises the skeptic to “take into the tenement block a handful of flowers from the fields and watch the brightened faces” and “eager love with which the little messengers of peace are shielded, once possessed” (182). Likewise, Riis views the New York gang members, often criminals, as either “a cowardly ruffian, or a possible hero with different training and under different social conditions” (221). The situation is no better for female tenants. Starvation wages often drive young women to what Riis calls “the paths of shame” (241). Finally, for those who succumb to their desperation, there are the city’s psychiatric facilities, which harbored nearly 5,000 patients in 1889. Riis concludes that the “strain of our hurried, over-worked life has something to do with this. Poverty has more. For these are all of the poor” (260).

The Urgency and Possibility of Reform

Riis highlights the immorality of allowing the tenement problem to fester and the danger to all New Yorkers should the problem persist, but he also offers a solution.

To solve the tenement problem, New Yorkers must “make the best of a bad bargain” (2). The tenements “with their restless, pent-up multitudes” hold well-to-do New Yorkers “at their mercy in the day of mob rule and wrath” (19). Riis warns “that the gap that separates the man with the patched coat from his wealthy neighbor is, after all, perhaps but a tenement” (41). To the native-born New Yorker, the Italian represents both “danger and reproach” (48). In Chinatown, the Chinese immigrants “[smoke] opium as Caucasians smoke tobacco, and apparently with little worse effect on himself” (95). Laborers in tenement-based sweatshops “recruit the ranks of the anarchists” (129). Riis describes the situation as a “choice” between “violence” or “justice” (264). New York’s working impoverished population will not bear their ill-treatment forever.

The book’s closing chapters offer both hope and a clear answer to the problem. Citing the work of local Protestant reformers, Riis promotes “the gospel of justice,” a Christian approach known as “Philanthropy and five per cent” (266). Therein lay the solution. Landlords must adopt Christian principles and be satisfied with reasonable income from rent. There is no alternative, Riis argues, but injustice and possible violence. The law has a role to play. Riis urges “the arrest and summary punishment of landlords, or their agents, who persistently violate law and decency,” in particular the “wealthy absentee landlords, who are the worst offenders” (284). Private citizens, however, must bear the heaviest burden. A few already have shown what is possible. Riis refers to Miss Ellen Collins, owner of “three old tenements” that once ranked among the city’s worst (285). Miss Collins immediately “let in the light in the hallways,” at which point the “heaps of refuse” disappeared along with the darkness (285). She adopted a program of “fair play between tenant and landlord” and has managed to realize an average of 5.5% profit (286). In short, she has made the care of tenants her “personal interest” (287). “The business of housing the poor,” Riis argues, “must be a business,” but it must be based on “the assumption that the workman has a just claim to a decent home,” for upon any grounds but these “any scheme for his relief fails” (271). Miss Collins’s example and a handful of others serve as the basis for Riis’s suggestion that the “model tenement” can be “made to pay” as long as “the owner will be content with the five or six percent” (295). Riis concludes the book with the metaphor of a turbulent ocean. New York sleeps while a rising “sea of a mighty population, held in galling fetters, heaves uneasily in the tenements” (296).