The Tenants Speak

During the 19th century, the focus on improving the lives of the tenants were laid in improving the designs of the tenement houses. They held competitions to see who could come up with the best design and tried to make changes to improve the health and sanitation of the residents. However, as discussed in class, the root issue of reforming the tenements lay not in the renovation of the buildings themselves but in raising the wages of the tenants.

The entire New York Society was attacking the tenement problem from the wrong angle every single time. They were hoping that instilling change in the buildings people occupied would instill change in the occupants of those buildings. They were working on hygiene and sanitation in schools as children, for when asked what they needed to do to stay healthy they replied "I must keep my skin clean,Wear clean clothes, Breathe pure air, And live in the sunlight." Perhaps cleaner people and a cleaner environment would help the poor people rise from rags to riches and prosper in society, living the American Dream. Last I knew, although cleanliness will make a person appear more presentable to the public, such as when Ragged Dick cleaned up his clothes and washed, it doesn't mean that food will now magically be on the peoples' plates and the rent will suddenly become manageable. Their jobs remain the same, their wages remain the same, and their social and economic status still remains at the bottom.

Reformers like Jacob Riis, had other ideas as to how to eliminate poverty from the city which included renovating or rebuilding the houses in which the people lived. Riis suggests that the three effective ways in dealing with this include "by law, by remodeling and making the most out of the old houses, [and] by building new, model tenements" (Riis, 223). New plumbing would be nice, because without it "you had to go down to the yard, and the toilets were in the yard" (Sigrist). Also, if air and light could reach all corners of rooms, that would provide people with in essence more hope by lightening the atmosphere in the home. However, new innovations and inventions placed in the tenements would increase the cost of the housing and the poor  people whose home's they were supposed to belong to couldn't afford it. Why? Because their occupational wages were too low to support themselves and family.

By making minimum wage a law in the United States, this would increase the amount of money that the poverty stricken people earned, allowing them to afford better housing and giving themselves better quality lives. The poor weren't poor because the tenements made them poor. The poor were poor because their wages made them poor, with tenement housing being the only home they could afford to have. Sanitation in an area where disease spread was inevitable, cleanliness and plumbing in an area where the drinking, washing, and bathroom water were all too close, and education in an area of ignorance would all be beneficial to the poor residents in New York City, however they wouldn't be forward progress in improving their poverty status. The focus of the reformation of the time should have been on the wages of the tenants and not on the tenement buildings themselves. Changing the appearance of a living space won't change the quality of the living space.

My question of the reformation is when did the tenement housing stop? I know some of the buildings are still around and used today, but there aren't a lot of people living in these kinds of conditions in the city today? What happened to the people and the tenements they called home?