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
In spite of this, the landlord has done his share; chiefly perhaps by
yielding--not always gracefully--when it was no longer of any use to
fight. There have been exceptions, however: men and women who have
mended and built with an eye to the real welfare of their tenants as
well as to their own pockets. Let it be well understood that the two
are inseparable, if any good is to come of it. The business of housing
the poor, if it is to amount to anything, must be business, as it was
business with our fathers to put them where they are. As charity,
pastime, or fad, it will miserably fail, always and everywhere. This
is an inexorable rule, now thoroughly well understood in England and
continental Europe, and by all who have given the matter serious
thought here. Call it poetic justice, or divine justice, or anything
else, it is a hard fact, not to be gotten over. Upon any other plan
than the assumption that the workman has a just claim to a decent home,
and the right to demand it, any scheme for his relief fails. It must
be a fair exchange of the man's money for what he can afford to buy at
a reasonable price. Any charity scheme merely turns him into a pauper,
however it may be disguised, and drowns him hopelessly in the mire out
of which it proposed to pull him. And this principle must pervade the
whole plan. Expert management of model tenements succeeds where amateur
management, with the best intentions, gives up the task, discouraged,
as a flat failure. Some of the best-conceived enterprises, backed
by abundant capital and good-will, have been wrecked on this rock.
Sentiment, having prompted the effort, forgot to stand aside and let
business make it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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