How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New YorkRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Tenement houses -- New York (State) -- New York
The reader who has followed with me the fate of the Other Half thus
far, may not experience much of a shock at being told that in eight
years 135,595 families in New York were registered as asking or
receiving charity. Perhaps, however, the intelligence will rouse him
that for five years past one person in every ten who died in this city
was buried in the Potter's Field. These facts tell a terrible story.
The first means that in a population of a million and a half, very
nearly, if not quite, half a million persons were driven, or chose, to
beg for food, or to accept it in charity at some period of the eight
years, if not during the whole of it. There is no mistake about these
figures. They are drawn from the records of the Charity Organization
Society, and represent the time during which it has been in existence.
It is not even pretended that the record is complete. To be well within
the limits, the Society's statisticians allow only three and a half to
the family, instead of the four and a half that are accepted as the
standard of calculations which deal with New York's population as a
whole. They estimate upon the basis of their every-day experience that,
allowing for those who have died, moved away, or become for the time
being at least self-supporting, eighty-five per cent. of the registry
are still within, or lingering upon, the borders of dependence.
Precisely how the case stands with this great horde of the indigent
is shown by a classification of 5,169 cases that were investigated by
the Society in one year. This was the way it turned out: 327 worthy of
continuous relief, or 6.4 per cent.; 1,269 worthy of temporary relief,
or 24.4 per cent.; 2,698 in need of work, rather than relief, or 52.2
per cent.; 875 unworthy of relief, or 17 per cent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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