How the Other Half Lives

Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) is a photojournalistic account of New York City’s working class of the late 19th century and the tenements that housed them. Riis exposes the appalling and often inhumane conditions in and around the tenements. He attributes New York City’s squalor and degradation to sheer greed on the part of landlords who prioritize maximum profits over basic decency. More importantly, he documents these conditions with more than 40 visual supplements, nearly all of them photographs. These images contributed to the book’s success and helped pioneer a style of “muckraking” journalism in pursuit of social reform. Riis concludes that the landlords themselves could solve the tenement problem by adopting Christian principles in their treatment of tenants and settling for a reasonable return of 5-6% on their investment in tenement property.

Content Warning: The text uses antiquated language regarding race and other terms relating to women, people without houses, suicide, and sex work that are considered insensitive to modern audiences.

Summary

Riis opens with a brief introduction that highlights the book’s major themes. First, the appalling conditions facing those who are impoverished are The Consequences of Greed. Landlords have the ability to provide decent housing but instead have chosen to cram as many rent-paying families into as few spaces as possible. Second, Riis views the Tenements as Locus and Source of New York City’s Social Ills: alcoholism, disease, pauperism, and crime. Riis always distinguishes between what he defines as the “honest” impoverished and the criminals or unemployed people who think the world owes them a living, but he also believes that the lives of the former would improve, and the numbers of the latter would shrink if New Yorkers were to solve the housing problem. Finally, Riis argues for both The Urgency and Possibility of Reform. The tenements breed conditions so awful that it would hardly be surprising if they also bred angry hordes of social revolutionaries. Riis suggests, however, that the landlords still have the power to solve the problem by adopting a mixture of capitalist and Christian principles.

Early chapters describe the history of the tenements, recent reform efforts, and the ethnic mixture of current tenement communities. The tenement problem developed over a period of decades in response to massive surges in immigration. Rather than viewing these immigrants as human beings who required decent housing, most of New York’s landlords viewed them as an investment opportunity. In the second half of the 19th century, particularly after the Civil War, New Yorkers began to notice the tenement problem, and a few reform-minded individuals tried to address it. By then, however, the scope of the problem defied piecemeal remedies, legislative or otherwise. Riis, therefore, appeals to the landlords’ humanity as the best hope for improving the lives of their tenants.

To heighten New Yorkers’ sense of alarm over conditions in the tenements, Riis emphasizes the tenement communities’ ethnic or “racial” composition. In the very foreignness of the tenants themselves, native-born New Yorkers are meant to see possible danger to the social order. Riis seldom fails to express sympathy for the honest impoverished no matter their ethnic origins, but he is also a man of the late-19th century who shares that era’s assumptions about group identities, often categorized under the broad heading of “race.” Modern readers, therefore, should view Riis’s language regarding Chinese and Jewish immigrants in particular not as unique to Riis but as an artifact representing the time in which he lived.

Riis’s photojournalistic approach begins in Chapter 4 and continues through Chapter 22. Seventeen of these 19 chapters feature at least one and as many as four images, nearly all of them photographs. Riis takes the reader on a literary and visual tour of the tenements. He begins in downtown New York City, below 14th Street, on the southern part of Manhattan Island. Most of the city’s tenements, including nearly all of the worst ones, are located here, and the majority of these are found on the East Side. Some of these chapters focus on individual communities as defined by ethnicity or “race.” Examples of these—as well as the type of language Riis employs—include “The Italian in New York,” “Chinatown,” “Jewtown,” “The Sweaters of Jewtown,” “The Bohemians—Tenement-House Cigarmaking,” and “The Color Line in New York.” Other chapters highlight the tenements’ location, such as “The Down Town Back Alley” and “The Bend”—the latter a reference to the notorious Mulberry Street “Bend,’’ where conditions are so deplorable that the tenements are slated for demolition and set to be replaced by a public park. Riis also devotes three consecutive chapters to the youngest groups the tenements affect: “The Problem of the Children,” “Waifs of the City’s Slums,” and “The Street Arab.” “A Raid on the Stale-Beer Dives” and “The Cheap Lodging Houses” present a view at least partially drawn from the law-enforcement perspective. “The Reign of Rum,” “The Harvest of Tares,” “Pauperism in the Tenements,” and “The Working Girls of New York” cover alcoholism, crime, “beggary," and the plight of working women, respectively. The last of these often cannot support themselves without resorting to sex work. “The Common Herd” presents an overview of conditions in the tenements, and “The Wrecks and the Waste” describes those confined in prisons or psychiatric hospitals.

The book’s final three chapters return to the major themes. Riis warns that violence and justice are the only alternatives to serious, Christian-minded, business-driven reform. If landlords are determined to cling to their maximum-return-on-rent approach to housing the impoverished, then violence will be the result. Riis does not propose massive public expenditure, and he believes that misplaced charity has contributed to the problem. He suggests instead that landlords can adopt Christian principles and still make a reasonable profit of between 5 and 6% on investment. He even cites examples of landlords who have put these principles into practice with resounding success. Riis opens his final chapter with eight “bald facts” about the tenement problem, all of which reduce to the observation that New York’s wage-earners must have decent housing (282). If they do not get it, then not even the American system of government will save well-to-do New Yorkers from the wrath of those whom they have so long neglected.