Sluminization

With cities booming, nearly tripling their population, and cities swelling with workers, the demand for cheap housing substantially increased. And with so many workers needing a place to live, builders built dark, disease-ridden, poorly constructed, fire-prone buildings with the minimal level of utilities, called tenements.

Between 1815 and 1900, New York City commonly is believed to have offered its poor citizens the worst housing conditions of any of the world’s major industrialized cities. History emphasizes the following features: high population density leading to extreme overcrowding of tenements; tenement houses packed together as closely as possible to maximize land use. 

Up to 1879, tenement dwellings in New York were modified private houses or rear tenements built behind such, or buildings put up solely for tenement purposes, covering 75 to 90 percent of New York’s area. In 1879 appeared the typical New York tenement, the “double-decker” or “dumbbell.” Built five stories high on a lot 25 feet wide it covers from 86 to 90 percent of the lot’s area, with 14 rooms, for four families, on each floor. Its typical and only feature is the laterally indented air shaft, usually 28 inches wide in the widest part. All rooms except the four outside ones open upon this shaft, which gives little daylight and no ventilation below the fourth story, this is the source of greatest danger during fires, and has been described hygienically, as a “The worst housing in America.” Under such conditions perhaps a million New Yorkers live.

With extremely crowded and over populated cities people crowded these tenements thus being prone to disease. In these compact tenements, people being so close together, often contributed to the spreading of tuberculosis and other diseases. Over eight thousand people died from this case and many were diagnosed. These tenements are killing thousands of people and new housing is desperately needed.

To conclude this article I have found that tenements and the urbanization of America really turned out to be an act of Sluminization. This is really bad and needs to be changed, immediately. The urbanization of America has not helped but in fact hurt our country greatly.