The urban paradox: how the concentration of wealth structurally ensures extreme poverty

“ It is a remarkable fact that the locality in which the Italian financiers first settled in London should obtain a name which has continued to the present day as a synonym of finance, and was used by the late Mr. Bagehot as the title of his great work.
Matthew Paris tells us that the houses which the Italian moneylenders built for themselves were so costly that, although at one period the Italians were anxious to leave the kingdom to escape the persecutions they suffered from, they were constrained to remain by the loss they feared to incur by deserting their houses. ”

“ During the eighth century, when a more settled condition of life became possible, the trade and commerce of London increased in volume and prosperity. A change, however, came about towards the end of the{8} century, when the Scandinavian freebooters, known to us as Danes, began to harry our coasts. The Saxons had become law-abiding, and the fierce Danes treated them in the same way that in former days they had treated the Britons. ”

“ The King’s Palace—The Tower THE Tower of London has existed for over eight centuries, and long before the Conquest the site was occupied by a Roman fortification. It is the most time-honoured building in Great Britain, and probably the foremost building (not a ruin) in the world.
With so much in London that is new, it is a source of the deepest pride to every Londoner that there is a relic of the past of unequalled interest, on whose walls are written the chief incidents of the history of England. ”

“ London has always appealed to the imagination of the adventurous country youth to be the home of golden promise. If he can only get there he believes that his successful career has commenced, but it appears that in Elizabeth’s reign there was pretty much the same difficulty in obtaining employment as there is now. This is illustrated by a curious account of the early life of John Sadler, a native of Stratford-on-Avon, and one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, which has come down to us. ”

“ There is no greater preservative against envy of the superior classes and contempt for the inferior than the gradual and unbroken fading of one class of society into another.... But when the rich and the poor are separated by an abyss which there is no hope of ever crossing, how pride, on the one side, and envy, on the other, rage! and especially in the centres of industry, the great cities, where the deepest [222] misery is found side by side with the most brazen-faced luxury, and where the wretched themselves, conscious of their numbers, mutually excite their own bad passions. ”

“ Dr. Jessopp gives a vivid picture of the frightful condition of town populations. He writes: ‘The sediment of the town population in the Middle Ages was a dense slough of stagnant misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease and dull despair, such as the worst slums of London, Paris or Liverpool know nothing of.’ [126]
Dr. Charles Creighton, in his monumental work on epidemics, [127] takes the view that we must receive with some scepticism the extremely unsatisfactory accounts of the condition of old London. ”

“ Excessive luxury in the upper classes is usually accompanied with misery among those at the opposite end of the social [69] scale; because the rich in such a state of society are heartless, and not only neglect the poor, but oppress them. ”

“ Whenever the people of a nation become subservient and dependent, and are oppressed and abused because they are so, whenever there is little general prosperity but a great deal of prosperity for a few, we naturally come to the conclusion that the cause of the misery and lack of general prosperity is the great concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. ”

“ The sad history of many a country can be pictured by that little diagram because concentrated wealth means power, caste, privilege, corruption and decay of every ideal, whether of manhood, morals or patriotism. ”

“ Wealth has accumulated itself into masses; and poverty, also in accumulation enough, lies impassably separated from it; opposed, uncommunicating, like forces in positive and negative poles. The gods of this lower world sit aloft on glittering thrones, less happy than Epicurus’s gods, but as indolent, as impotent; while the boundless living chaos of ignorance and hunger welters, terrific in its dark fury, under their feet. ”

“ The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.
[118]
[119] BOOK III The Outcast
The life of the underworld, of those thrown upon the scrap-heap of the modern industrial machine ”

“ The City of London obtained from Henry I. the right of appointing their own sheriffs, which was a very great privilege, and there must have been some very strong reason to induce the King to grant this great favour. Bishop Stubbs writes of this charter of Henry I. to the citizens of London: ‘The privileges of the{220} citizens of London are not to be regarded as a fair specimen of the liberties of ordinary towns, but as a sort of type and standard of the amount of municipal independence and self-government at which the other towns of the country might be expected to aim. ”

“ Fleet Street and the Strand were not the important thoroughfares during the Middle Ages that Holborn was. The roads were much neglected, and no one traversed them who could travel by boat on the Thames, which was literally the Silent Highway of London.
When the gates of London were closed at eight o’clock at night, and the inhabitants were ruled with an iron hand, it was somewhat a sign of reproach to live outside the walls. This feeling continued for centuries, and the name of ‘suburbs’ was long held in little respect. ”

“ In 1377 the population, reckoned by the poll tax, was 44,770; the number taxed (consisting of males and females above fourteen years of age) being 23,314. We see from these numbers how greatly the population of London was in excess of the other great towns. From the same source we find the population of the towns next in size were:—
Londoners were fortunate in not having suffered from any severe attack upon their fortifications, and therefore we are unable to tell how London would have stood a prolonged siege. ”

“ Stuart London followed Tudor London, but with the death of James I. in 1625 the older history may be said to close, for there was a considerable change during the reign of Charles I. The upper classes moved westward to Lincoln’s Inn and Great Queen Street and Covent Garden. The great architect, Inigo Jones, built houses for them in both these districts.
There was a certain stagnation in the movements of the population during the period of the Commonwealth, but at the Restoration of Charles II. a new life came into existence. ”

“ But how will they explain the magnificence of one habitation as compared with the squalid misery of another? Through what medium can the idea of servitude enter their minds? When will they comprehend the great and miserable fact—the evidences of which appeal to their senses everywhere—that one portion of earth’s lost inhabitants was rolling in luxury while the multitude was toiling for scanty food? ”

“ One of the most important factors in our continued growth is the construction of more good, up-to-date housing. In a country such as ours there is no reason why decent homes should not be within the reach of all. With the help of various Government programs we have made great progress in the last few years in increasing the number of homes.
Despite this increase, there is still an acute shortage of housing for the lower and middle-income groups, especially in large metropolitan areas. We have laid the groundwork for relieving the plight of lower-income families in the Housing Act of 1949. ”

“ This category of city dwellers desperately needs much better housing and living conditions than is available to them now, both in a rehabilitated city and in outlying municipalities. They make up, along with the other classes of persons earlier mentioned who also cannot afford the only generally permitted housing in the developing municipalities, the acknowledged great demand for low and moderate income housing. ”

“ In the field of human needs, we must carry forward the housing program, which is contributing so greatly to the well-being of our people and the prosperity of our economy. Home ownership is now advanced to the point where almost three of every five families in our cities, towns, and suburbs own the houses they live in.
For the housing program, most of the legislative authority already exists. However, a firm program of public housing is essential until the private building industry has found ways to provide more adequate housing for low-income families. ”

“ To aid the middle-income families, I recommend that the Congress enact new legislation authorizing a vigorous program to help cooperatives and other nonprofit groups build housing which these families can afford.
Rent control has done a great deal to prevent the housing shortage from having had worse effects during this postwar period of adjustment. Rent control is still necessary to prevent widespread hardship and sharp curtailment of the buying power of millions of consumers in metropolitan areas. ”

“ If poverty did not mean wretched housing, it would be shorn of half its dangers. The London poor are driven to pay one-third of their income for dark, damp rooms which are too small and too few in houses which are ill-built and overcrowded. And above the overcrowding of the house and of the room comes the overcrowding of the bed—equally the result of poverty, and equally dangerous to health. Even if the food which can be provided out of 22s. a week, after 7s. ”

“ But it is the cause of a vast amount of misery amongst those who are compelled to seek a house close to their daily avocation. They are obliged to live upon the spot, and so, in the scarcity of abodes, pay whatever rent is demanded, always a most exorbitant one, and this they contrive to pay while work holds out, but the first drawback places them at the tender mercies of their Mrs Prodgers, when their life becomes a burden, and too often that most real of all distresses, a distress for rent, sweeps away the little hardly-gained furniture. ”

“ This loss of efficiency is usually attributed to insufficient food and long hours, but it is at least an open question if housing conditions are not the more potent factor not only in the case of the very poor, but even in the case of the family having an income of $2000 a year. Life in a boarding-house adapted from the use by one family to that of five or six without increase of bathing and ventilating conveniences, with old-style plumbing, cannot be mentally or bodily invigorating. ”

“ In taking stock of diseases and epidemics in London, we may note that many of the pestilences previous to the Black Death were due to famine. Dr. Creighton says of the year 1258 that ‘so great was the pinch in London from the failure of the crops and the want of money that fifteen thousand are said to have died of famine and of a grievous and widespread pestilence that broke out about the Feast of the Trinity, 19th May.’ The number is that given by Matthew Paris, and Dr. Creighton adds: ‘It suggests a larger population in the capital than we might have been disposed to credit. ”

“ In theory, low and moderate income families should benefit even from construction of new housing which they themselves cannot afford because such housing creates vacancies which ‘filter down.’ In reality, however, most of these vacancies are absorbed by the enormous lag between population growth and new housing construction. Sagalyn & Sternlieb, supra at 42. The housing which does ‘filter down’ to persons with low or moderate incomes is often badly dilapidated and in deteriorating neighborhoods. ”

“ Few people have the sense of financial individuality strongly developed. They do not know what it means to be a controller of wealth, to have that which releases the sources of social action—its medium of exchange. They want money, but not for money’s sake. They want it for what it will buy in the way of simple comforts, whereas the financier wants it for what it will control—for what it will represent in the way of dignity, force, power. ”

“ At a breeze he must smother in the whirlpools of dust, and if he should decline at any time to inhale the smoke he has the meager alternative of suicide.
The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches. He gets them and pants the fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously. He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: “Wealth! I will get Wealth! I will make Wealth! I will sell Wealth for more Wealth! My house shall be dirty, my garment shall be dirty, and I will foul my neighbor so that he cannot be clean—but I will get Wealth! ”

“ Much of the existing misery is caused by selfishness—by the greed to accumulate wealth on the one hand, and by improvidence on the other. Accumulation of money has become the great desire and passion of the age. The wealth of nations, and not the happiness of nations, is the principal aim. We study political economy, and let social economy shift for itself. ”

“ And yet there are persons who constantly clamor against this state of things. They call it aristocracy. They excite the poor to make war upon the rich, while in truth they know not who are either rich or poor. They complain of oppression, speculation, and the pernicious influence of accumulated wealth. They cry out loudly against all banks and corporations, and all the means by which small capitals become united, in order to produce important and beneficial results. ”

“ Every observant person must admit that the great concentration of wealth, whether it be in corporations, trusts, or individuals, has reached a point dangerous to the future prosperity of the nation.
Millions of people idle, wealth piled up for the few by the toil of the many, paupers and millionaires on every side, and161 the conditions growing worse and worse,—these things are enough to make even the most optimistic painfully apprehensive of the future. ”

“ It does not seem to matter to him that the price of his wealth is the abject misery of many whom in church on Sundays he calls his brothers. So have I seen a greedy pig snouting in the trough long after he has eaten his fill, and pushing aside some half-starved weakling of the same litter. The vaunted brotherhood of man is like that. Do you think that you have solved all problems when you have spoken glibly of supply and demand, or this new doctrine of the survival of the fittest? ”

“ Our mastery over the forces of mature has led to a rapid growth of population, and a vast accumulation of wealth; but these have brought with them such au amount of poverty and crime, and have fostered the growth of so much sordid feeling and so many fierce passions, that it may well be questioned, whether the mental and moral status of our population has not on the average been lowered, and whether the evil has not overbalanced the good. ”