A byproduct of progress: the slum as the structural flaw of the modern city

“ THE GROWTH OF THE CITY: AN INTRODUCTION TO A RESEARCH PROJECT The outstanding fact of modern society is the growth of great cities. Nowhere else have the enormous changes which the machine industry has made in our social life registered themselves with such obviousness as in the cities. In the United States the transition from a rural to an urban civilization, though beginning later than in Europe, has taken place, if not more rapidly and completely, at any rate more logically in its most characteristic forms. ”

“ So individuals build their homes, communities are formed, and eventually there comes into existence a great city. But the very existence of a great city creates problems of health, of family life, and social control which did not exist when men lived in the open, or in villages. Just as the human body generates the poisons that eventually destroy it, so the communal life, in the very process of [Pg 957] growth and as a result of its efforts to meet the changes that its growth involves, creates diseases and vices which tend to destroy the community. This raises the problem in another form. ”

“ Cor­rectly viewed, urban areas constitute a spearhead of economic and social development.
In some cases, however, unplanned growth has resulted in the creeping disease of urban blight. Cities outgrow them­selves without realizing it. Inadequate sanitation facilities, shortage of social services, lack of housing resulting in the growth of slums, excessive speculation in land, lack of public transportation coupled with inadequate streets, pollution of the atmosphere—these are some of the symptoms of the progressive disease known as urban blight. ”

“ Developing-country cities are growing much faster than the capacity of authorities to cope. Shortages or housing, water. sanitation, and mass transit are widespread. A growing proportion of city-dwellers live in slums and shanty towns, many of them exposed to air and water pollution and to industrial and natural hazards. Further deterioration is likely, given that most urban growth will take place in the largest cities. Thus more manageable cities may be the principal gain from slower rates or population growth.
54. Urbanization is itself part or the development process. ”

“ The only aspect of growth adequately described by Bücher and Weber was the rather obvious process of the aggregation of urban population. Almost as overt a process, that of expansion, has been investigated from a different and very practical point of view by groups interested in city planning, zoning, and regional surveys. Even more significant than the increasing density of urban population is its correlative tendency to overflow, and so to extend over wider areas, and to incorporate these areas into a larger communal life. ”

“ Studies of urban growth reveal that the city grows outward from its central business district (1) in a series of expanding zones. [73] There is a “zone of transition” (2) encircling the downtown area. This is the area of deterioration, the so-called “slum”, created in large part by the invasion of business and light manufacture. A third area (3) is inhabited by workers in industry who have escaped from the area of deterioration (2) and who desire to live within easy access of their work. ”

“ The growth of large cities is so closely related to the problems of poverty as to deserve a separate treatment. The movements of population form a group of facts more open than most others to precise measurement, and from them much light is thrown on the condition of the working classes. That the towns are growing at the expense of the country, is a commonplace to which we ought to seek to attach a more definite meaning.
We may trace the inflow of country-born people into the towns by looking either at the statistics of towns, or of rural districts. ”

“ The rapid growth of cities has been a marked feature of recent growth and development. The city of to-day is the result of a rapid and unhealthy growth. People have been rudely drawn from a rural environment and quickly sucked into these great uneasy vortices of industry and trade. The ideals, customs and habits of the rural community have gone with them to this new environment, and still cling with great tenacity. Only in recent years have the city dwellers awakened to the fact that they are really dwelling in an environment which calls for new, non-rural rules of action and of association. ”

“ The urban tendency of the rural populations led to terrible congestion in the great cities. There was stifling and impure air, and lo, rapid transit at once attacked the evil. Every great city has become but the nucleus of a greater city which surrounds it; the one the seat of business, the other the seat of domestic happiness. Between the two, night and morning, by electric road, steam railway, and bicycle path, ebbs and flows the middle-class population. And in the same direction lies the remedy for the tenement evil. In the cleansing country air the slum cannot exist. ”

“ The vastness of the problem of the city slum, and the impossibility, even with unlimited resources of men and money, of permanently raising the standards of living of many of our immigrants as long as they are crowded together, and as long as the stream of newer immigrants pours into these same slums, has naturally forced itself upon the minds of thinking persons. ”

“ Ben Wah 444 (p. 001) THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM WHAT THE FIGHT IS ABOUT
The slum is as old as civilization. Civilization implies a race to get ahead. In a race there are usually some who for one cause or another cannot keep up, or are thrust out from among their fellows. They fall behind, and when they have been left far in the rear they lose hope and ambition, and give up. ”

“ The tenement house problem we had to meet in New York was the most serious of any city in the civilized world, for in New York, according to the last census, out of 3,437,202 inhabitants, 2,273,079, or more than two-thirds, lived in tenement houses, and there were 82,652 of these tenements in the city. ”

“ The great mass of the working class population is housed either in converted dwellings or in tenement houses of the primitive type commonly erected here, as in Manhattan, twenty to forty years ago; and these two classes of houses, which in the great city have been rapidly giving way, during the last generation, before the onslaught of the dumb-bell tenement with its characteristic eighteen-inch wide air-shaft and overcrowded lot, in the smaller city show few signs of a similar yielding of place. ”

“ In the cities land is scarce and valuable, and room is only to be had by expanding upward instead of laterally. Inventive genius has supplied us with elevators, steam heat, electric light. Questions of public safety, correct sanitation, guards against fire, protection against burglary, safe means of rapid ingress and egress, have formed other conditions. The spread of manufactures, the making of artificial building materials, as iron and glass, have given us new forces. ”

“ To the home it comes down in the end,—good government, bad government, and all the rest. As the homes of a community are, so is the community. New York has still the worst housing system in the world. Eight fifteenths of its people [Pg 94] live in tenements, not counting the better class of flats, though legally they come under the definition. The blight of the twenty-five-foot lot remains, with the double-decker. But we can now destroy what is not fit to stand; we have done it, and our republic yet survives. ”

“ Whether the landlord’s rent will by the law proposed in any city be diminished below the point of legitimate profit, cannot be certainly demonstrated until the experiment be tried. Some enlightened landlords, with a sense of their obligations toward their tenants, are perfectly willing to suffer this small diminution of income. Others are not, and the others, who usually constitute the majority, in alliance with the builders and material men, will always seek to prevent legislation which affects their pockets. ”

“ In fifty years how will it be? "The offspring of municipal neglect" the Assembly Committee of 1857 called our "tenement-house" system. "Forgetfulness of the poor" was the way a citizens' council put it. It comes to the same thing. Whether seen from the point of view of the citizen, the philanthropist, or the Christian, the slum is the poorest investment a city can make, and once made it is not easily unmade. ”

“ Urban slum conditions created tremendous economic, social, and psychological strains. Ghetto life added a new dimension of social disorganization to an already oppressed community. The anonymity of life in large urban centers tended to remove many of the social constraints to individual behavior. ”

“ Nearly all are young men, unsettled in life, many—most of them, perhaps—fresh from good homes, beyond a doubt with honest hopes of getting a start in the city and making a way for themselves. Few of them have much money to waste while looking around, and the cheapness of the lodging offered is an object. Fewer still know anything about the city and its pitfalls. They have come in search of crowds, of “life,” and they gravitate naturally to the Bowery, the great democratic highway of the city, where the twenty-five-cent lodging-houses take them in. ”

“ Thenceforward, if left to their own resources, they are the victims, not the masters, of their environment; and it is a bad master. They drag one another always farther down. The bad environment becomes the heredity of the next generation. Then, given the crowd, you have the slum ready-made.
The battle with the slum began the day civilization recognized in it her enemy. It was a losing fight until conscience joined forces with fear and self-interest against it. When common sense and the golden rule obtain among men as a rule of practice, it will be over. ”

“ In Croatia, Serbia, and Bohemia it is unheard of for a young woman to go out alone with a young man.
Moreover, coming as so many of these people [175] do from small villages or rural communities, they have been used to a single-group life which is impossible in a city. As one Italian woman has expressed it, work and recreation went hand in hand in the old country. During the day there was the work of both men and women in the fields in congenial groups, and in the evenings songs and dancing in the village streets. The whole family worked and played together with other family groups. ”

“ The Italian parents, on the other hand, try to guard their girls almost as closely as they did in Italy. It is not especially to be wondered at, for what the immigrant father or mother sees is usually the worst in American city life. If the daughter could not be trusted alone or unchaperoned in a village in which they knew most of the people and all the places of amusement, is she any more safe in a city in which, as one foreign-born mother says, "You don't know what is around the corner from you"? ”

“ With the change from the country to the city, it has already been suggested that the old group life with its simple pleasures, which the whole family shared, has become impossible. If the mother then tries to see that her daughter has social life in which she herself may share, she either cuts her off from most of the normal pleasures of young people of her age, or the mother finds herself in places where she is not wanted, and where no provision has been made for her entertainment. ”

“ I spoke of the instinct for the crowd in the man as evidence that the slum had got its grip on him. And it is true of the boy. The experience that the helpless poor will not leave their slum when a chance of better things is offered is wearily familiar to most of us. One has to have resources to face the loneliness of the woods and the fields. We have seen what resources the slum has at its command. ”

“ So what we all thought the "way out" of the slum seems barred for the time being. For there is no other explanation of the failure than that the people will not go "among the stumps." Lack of facilities for getting there played a part, possibly, but a minor one, and now there is no such grievance. The simple fact is that the home-feeling that makes a man rear a home upon the soil as the chief ambition of his life was not there. The tenement and the flat have weakened that peg among the class of workers for whom Homewood was planned. ”

“ The streets and houses, alleys and courts, are their hunting grounds. As valley and mountain are to the natural savage, street and building are valley and mountain to them. The slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in the jungle. ”

“ Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject poverty, while five minutes’ walk from almost any point will bring one to a slum; but the region my hansom was now penetrating was one unending slum. The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. ”

“ A crusade for the extirpation of the slums of Boston has been waged for the last fifteen years, thus far with no great success. Housing conditions are justly to be condemned so long as old, dilapidated and unsanitary buildings are allowed to stand, often so overcrowded upon the land that sunlight and air are practically shut out. Such conditions are a disgrace to any city. They tempt the most wretched of the poor, or vicious, or criminal classes to worse degradation. The breadwinner loses his health, which is his only wealth. Children grow up in shameless loss of self-respect. ”

“ From the standpoint of simple decency and clean manhood and womanhood, any mean street, of all its mean streets, is a slum. Where sights and sounds abound which neither you nor I would care to have our children see and hear is a place where no man's children should live, and see and hear. ”

“ If we would stop emigration from the towns we must tackle the employment question, we must make employment secure, we must raise wages to a level that will make it worth a man’s while to stay in the homeland amid familiar surroundings. We must tackle the slums question. We create slums by our conditions of industry and employment. The unemployed rapidly degenerate physically, mentally and morally, and drift into the slums, consorting there with other hopeless and helpless ones who have been cast on to the social scrap-heap. ”

“ We cannot go to the lowest of our slum population and teach them to be clean, thrifty, industrious, steady, moral, intellectual, and religious, until we have first taught them how to secure for themselves the industrial conditions of healthy physical life. ”

“ Unless the two lines of work go on together, either one is bound to be futile in itself. If all of the slum districts [71] of our cities were removed to-morrow and model tenements built in their places, we would still have slums in a week’s time, because we have these mentally defective people who can never be taught to live otherwise than as they have been living. Not until we take care of this class and see to it that their lives are guided by intelligent people, shall we remove these sores from our social life. ”

“ Soap and water have worked a visible cure already that goes more than skin-deep. They are moral agents of the first value in the slum. And the day is coming soon now, when with real rapid transit and the transmission of power to suburban workshops the reason for the outrageous crowding shall cease to exist. It has been a long while, a whole century of city packing, closer and more close; but it looks as if the tide were to turn at last. Meanwhile, philanthropy is not sitting idle and waiting. It is building tenements on the humane plan that lets in sunshine and air and hope. ”

“ White has built homes for five hundred poor families since he began his work, and has made it pay well enough to allow good tenants a share in the profits, averaging nearly one month’s rent out of the twelve, as a premium upon promptness and order. The plan of his last tenements, reproduced on p. 292, may be justly regarded as the beau ideal of the model tenement for a great city like New York. It embodies all the good features of Sir Sydney Waterlow’s London plan, with improvements suggested by the builder’s own experience. ”

“ Gould's advice is good sense. If he is right, it is of the last importance; if I am right, it is still the way to proving me so by holding on to what is left of the home in the tenement and making the most of it. That we have taken the advice is good ground for hope, in the face of the fact that New York has still the worst housing in (p. 140) the world. We can now destroy what is not fit to stand. We have done it, and the republic yet survives. The slum landlord would have had us believe that it must perish with his rookeries. We are building model tenements and making them pay. ”

“ In some quarters benevolent people are proposing to build model tenements. That is good as far as it goes, but if at the same time other people, not benevolent, who have no motive but gain for themselves, are permitted to build tenements which are not models, the extent of progress is very limited. What we must do, first and foremost, is to secure proper legislation, using that term in its broadest sense, to include city ordinance, as well as state law. ”

“ If the community, as a whole, gives its mind to it, as the Philadelphia community seems to be doing, and knows conditions accurately and thoroughly, I am sure we are going to see very marked changes in the housing of the poorer people of the modern cities, and we shall no more cling to the single house than to the country store. ”

“ Do we not know that, under present conditions, just as that city over the bay grows in wealth and population, so will poverty deepen and vice increase; that just as the liveried carriages become more plentiful, so do the beggars; that just as the pleasant villas of wealth dot these slopes, so will rise up the noisome tenement-house in the city slums. I have watched the growth of San Francisco with joy and pride, and my imagination still dwells with delight upon the image of the great city of the future, the queen of all the vast Pacific—perhaps the greatest city of the world. ”

“ Government by the people must ever rest upon the people's ability to govern themselves, upon their intelligence and public spirit. The slum stands for ignorance, want, unfitness, for mob-rule in the day of wrath. This at one end. At the other, hard-heartedness, indifference, self-seeking, greed. It is human nature. We are brothers whether we own it or not, and when the brotherhood is denied in Mulberry Street we shall look vainly for the virtue of good citizenship on Fifth Avenue. ”

“ The misery which the slow evolution of urban and industrial civilisation has wrought in the crowded areas of our cities is manifest to the least observant eye. The pitiful condition of the man in the slum makes its clamorous appeal to the conscience of the race. ”