Chapter 15 Section 2 Critical Thinking #4

4) Which solution (or attempted solution) to an urban problem discussed in this section do you think had the most impact? Why?


The attempt made at finding a solution for housing had the greatest impact, though it was a negative one. Tenements were multi-family dwellings in the city that several immigrant families would live in together when the previous working class inhabitants of the home left the city. The alternatives were to buy a house in the outskirts of town and face problems with transportation or rent small boardinghouses in the city. Row houses were established as well; these were single-family dwellings shared walls with the other houses and crammed many families onto one block. Though tenements were in the central city and not as cramped as boardinghouses, they were often unsanitary and overcrowded. New York City passed a law in 1879 to improve the squalid conditions, setting minimum standards for plumbing and ventilation, and landlords started to build tenements with air shafts and windows in every room, but since garbage was picked up infrequently, people started to dump the garbage into air vents. This would attract rats and other unpleasant creatures one wouldn't like to have in their house, and people started to nail up the windows to keep the smell of rotting garbage out. Even though tenements were supposed to have been an improvement over row houses, boardinghouses and houses far from the city, they quickly ended up in terrible condition, cramped, filthy, unsanitary and worse than the original options (all p. 470).