1 jan 1901 ano - New York passes Tenement House Law

Descrição:

tenements: A high-density, cheap, five- or six-story housing unit designed for working-class urban populations. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tenements became a symbol of urban immigrant poverty.

Whether they arrived from the South or from Europe, Latin America, or Asia, working- class city residents needed cheap housing near their jobs. They faced grim choices. As urban land values climbed, speculators tore down houses vacated by middle-class families moving away from the industrial core. In their place, they erected five-or six-story tenements, buildings that housed twenty or more families in cramped, airless apartments. Tenements fostered rampant disease and horrific infant mortality. In New York’s Eleventh Ward, an average of 986 persons occupied each acre. One investigator in Philadelphia described twenty-six people living in nine rooms of a tenement. “The bathroom at the rear of the house was used as a kitchen,” she reported. “One privy compartment in the yard was the sole toilet accommodation for the five families living in the house.” African Americans often suffered most. A study of Albany, Syracuse, and Troy, New York, noted, “The colored people are relegated to the least healthful buildings.”

Denouncing these conditions, reformers called for model tenements financed by public-spirited citizens willing to accept a limited return on their investment. When private philanthropy failed to make a dent, cities turned to housing codes. The most advanced was New York’s Tenement House Law of 1901, which required interior courts, indoor toilets, and fire safeguards for new structures. The law, however, had no effect on the 44,000 tenements that already existed in Manhattan and the Bronx. Reformers were thwarted by the economic facts of urban development. Industrial workers could not afford transportation and had to live near their jobs; commercial development pushed up land values. Only high-density, cheaply built housing earned landlords a significant profit.

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