that owners of expensive homes effectively subsidized owners of smaller homes. Low-income families who sought to build a home still had to pay for indoor plumbing fixtures and to pay the city for water meters and operating costs.
In the long run, the public sewer model had an even more profound effect on housing costs. The perceived need for publicly owned, centralized sewer systems led to a significant growth in city government. Cities hired sanitary engineers who attempted to forecast future needs and write long-range plans to meet those needs.42 These long-range plans set a precedent for later city plans and increasingly specific regulations written to deal with such things as transportation, land uses, parks, historic buildings, watersheds, and trees. Although no one can argue the public health benefits of integrated sewage systems, later policies that, for example, imposed “impact fees” on homebuilders to pay for transportation or created time-consuming permitting processes for the cutting of individual trees significantly increased the costs of homeownership while providing dubious benefits.
Housing for Factory Workers
In the short run, another late 19th-century trend had an even larger effect on housing affordability: the growth of the factory system. The nation’s first factory, the Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, employed just nine workers. By 1880, factories remained small enough that close to 90 percent of the families of, say, Detroit could live in individual homes and workers would still be within walking distance of their places of employment.43
However, the average number of employees per factory more than doubled between 1869 and 1899 and continued to grow after that.44 By 1904, 60 percent of all manufacturing employees worked in factories with more than 100 employees, and 12 percent worked in factories with more than 1,000 employees.45 Moreover, the tendency of many industries, such as Chicago’s stockyards, to concentrate in one part of a city created transportation problems for workers.
Although some cities saw the installation of horsecars as early as 1850 and rapid growth of electric streetcar networks after 1890, factory workers earning between $3 and $6 a week could not afford to devote 10 to 20 percent of their incomes to transit fares. The limited amount of land within walking distance of factories, and the resulting high cost of such land, forced many to live in high-density tenements instead of single-family homes.
The word “tenements” brings to mind extremely high-density mid-rise buildings housing several families per apartment, or even per room, in New York City’s Lower East Side. Reformer Jacob Riis photographed residents of these buildings in the late 1880s and early 1890s. His 1889 book How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York included several of these photos and raised public attention about poor housing conditions and influenced the passage of several tenement laws.46
Riis’s tenements were five to six stories high built on 25-by-100 foot lots, meaning about 16 could fit on a single acre. The front and back of the buildings occupied the full width of the lot with a small airshaft between the buildings in the center. Because they were narrow in the middle to make room for the airshaft, these buildings were often called “dumbbells.”47 Designed to house four families to a floor, or up to 24 per building, they were sometimes packed with far more. The narrow airshafts meant that most rooms had little light, and the odors from the garbage that people inevitably threw to the inaccessible bottoms of the shafts must have been stifling. Many of these tenements had no indoor plumbing; those that did might have only one toilet per floor. Perhaps most scandalous to the middle-class readers of Riis’s book was the lack of privacy: children of all ages and both sexes often slept in the same rooms as their parents, other relatives, and unrelated boarders.
New York City tenement conditions were a direct function of the density of inner-city jobs. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory, site of the infamous fire that killed nearly 150 workers, occupied 3 floors of a 10-story building in lower Manhattan and employed 500 workers. The building covered about one-quarter acre out of the nearly 7,000 developed acres in Manhattan. Although pre-1890 factories would have fewer floors, even six-story factories could contain 4,000 workers per acre, most of whom had to live within walking distance of the buildings.
In 1910, the year before the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, Manhattan had about 2.3 million residents at an average population density of about 100,000 people per square mile. (For comparison, the median density of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas in 2000 was about 2,800 people per square mile.) Manhattan today has about 2.3 million jobs, and certainly nearly all the pre-1900 residents who had jobs worked in Manhattan. The combination of offices, factories, and residences competing for space made lower Manhattan some of the most valuable real estate in the world. Factory workers who couldn’t afford to commute off the island were forced to live in high-density environments, which is why the Lower East Side housed some 334,000 people per square mile in the 1880s.
The problem was compounded by 19th-century construction technology, which made it difficult to build structures taller than about six stories. (The nation’s first steel-framed skyscraper, St. Louis’s 10-story Wainwright Building, was built in 1891; the tallest commercial masonry building ever built, Chicago’s Monadnock Building, is also 10 stories and was also built in 1891.) Residents typically need a lot more space than factory workers; given Manhattan’s high land prices, the tenement was the way of packing as many workers and their families as possible into as little land as possible.
Although the conditions in the Lower East Side were truly awful, they were far from “the other half.” As historian Robert Barrows observes, “New York City’s Lower East Side, the case study most frequently cited because of its immaterial power, was virtually unique, an aberration that, in scale at least was replicated nowhere else in the country.”48 “New York has over 100,000 separate tenement houses, whereas in most American cities that tenement house is the exception rather than the rule,” admitted Lawrence Veiller in a 1912 speech. Veiller had worked harder than anyone to promote legislation outlawing the housing conditions pictured in Riis’s photographs.49
Public concern about urban housing for the poor actually dates back to well before the Civil War. In 1847, a group known as the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor published a survey showing that New York City tenement housing was “defective in size, arrangement, water supply, warmth, and ventilation, and that rents were disproportionately high.” As a result, the poor “suffer from sickness and premature mortality; their ability for self-maintenance is thereby destroyed; social habits and morals are debased, and a vast amount of wretchedness, pauperism, and crime is produced.”50
This belief in architectural determinism—the notion that the built environment shapes human behavior and a poorly built environment leads to debased morals, pauperism, and crime—guided the association’s solution, which was government regulation mandating minimum housing standards. Better housing, the association believed, would lead the poor to engage in less crime and more productive work, which would guide them out of poverty. Failing to persuade the New York City Council, the association went to the state legislature, which in 1867 passed a tenement house law requiring builders to provide a 10-foot backyard and a water supply and forbidding the renting of apartments that were totally underground. An 1879 law required a window in every room in a tenement.51
Ironically, the result of these laws were the dumbbell tenements that so horrified Jacob Riis: the narrow airshafts that created the dumbbell shape ensured that every room had a window even if the lower-story windows let in almost no light. This experience would be repeated over and over as low-income housing advocates, sometimes called “housers,” would propose government programs that, as finally implemented, did little for poor people other than make housing less affordable.
The New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, for example, required builders of new tenements to provide sanitary facilities, outward-facing windows in every room, and a courtyard for garbage removal in place of the airshafts where people tossed garbage. This act was considered
