Jacob Riis's 'How The Other Half Life'

In both Addams and Riis’s reading they each discuss poor immigrant neighborhood, were many lived in unsanitary and overcrowded homes or had exploitive and unfair working conditions. Adams and Riis both try to better this condition for those poor immigrant arrivals to the country in urban cities. Riis’s theory describes the impact of health and the development of character because of poor housing condition that affected people health and way of acting. Riis’s theory supports McCoy article on “Freddie Gray’s Life: A Study in the Sad Effect of Lead Point on Poor Blacks” because Riis discusses that poor housing condition specially if it causes an effect on the person it can either be mentally or physically it can influence the person actions.

In document 2 it shows how people are living in tenement buildings with small spaces. Tenement buildings don’t have that much space for many people to live in, and if someone gets sick everyone in that small space will get sick as well. Jacob Riis took these 2 photos from document 2 to show how the other half of the people live in tenement building and how they are suffering. The reformers method to achieve their goal is to establish the social organization centered in The Hull House. In document 7 it states that the poor will receive a helping hand whether they wish to educate themselves or to find work.

In her essay, she points that an individual should not be tagged as a criminal to the society due to his or her poverty. She also points that the government should provide more shelters to homeless, and that the government should help them to find a job in order to have them enrolled back in society. Unfortunately, the public housing, which is a support for poor families provided by the government, has been becoming an easy target for law enforcers to fine people that is in need. As Ehrenreich says, “The public housing that remains has become more prisonlike, with residents subjected to drug testing and random police sweeps”. It demonstrates the elephant in the room that the government wants to avoid such reality meanwhile people is suffering in public houses filled of diseases and filth.

The expansions of bedroom-communities also materialized to accommodate the large volume of new Americans that was being produced. After the World War II numerous individuals purchased land on the outskirts of urban-cities and use the advancement of technology to create inexpensive houses that was attractive to the baby-boomers. To further accommodate the audience the G.I. Bill of the returning soldiers & their families made housing in the suburbs even cheaper. In a way it was a win-win for man and country. It wasn’t all peaches & roses in the late 1950s for minorities.

The Progressive Era was a time period where people known as Muckrakers exposed the problems of everyday people like the poor living conditions while the progressives tried different ways to fix those problems. During this time, there were also six goals that they focused on protecting social welfare, promoting moral improvement, improving efficiency and labor, creating economic and government reforms. One of the major reforms of this time was the Social Welfare reform which helped to improve some of the problems that people faced such as poor housing, lack of education, and social welfare for women. In 1890, Jacob Riis published a book called How the Other Half Lives which exposed the harsh and poor living conditions of immigrants in tenement

There should be a plan for a mix of housing based on current and future demographic trends, market trends and the needs of different groups in the community. Furthermore, there is a need to identify the size, type, tenure and range of housing that is required in particular locations, reflecting local demand and that there should be policies which are sufficiently flexible of the changing market conditions (Affordable housing Supplementary

Most immigrants went straight to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and rented very small rooms or even just a bed for around fifty cents to a dollar a week. These people were called boarders or lodgers. Usually there were around five large families in a decent size in every tenement house, and there was very little sanitation or extra room. To the rest of America, this wasn’t even a known problem until in 1890; Jacob Riis published “How the Other Half Lives”, featuring pictures of tenement houses and city streets. This book brought to light the real struggle of immigrant life in the early 1900s.

Tenements were built poorly, the builders wanted to waste as little space as they could to maximize the number of renters. The builders started to use cheap materials

Starting in the 1980s, successive governments encouraged local authorities to sell off social housing, which has not been replaced. The private construction sector has so far failed to increase supply in response to soaring demand("Simon Communities in Ireland > Homelessness > Causes of Homelessness," n.d.). Step Five: Recommend and Implement Solutions IT sounds overly-simplistic, but the ¬solution to solving Ireland’s accommodation crisis is to build more houses and apartments.

Thus, we need a new housing policy that will address not only the discriminate housing problem, but also urban poverty in general. Issue History The Civil Rights Act of 1964 eliminated the Jim-Crow

From riots to invasions, many urban problems arose during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Technology was improving and it was making jobs easier and more productive but American’s were tired and weren’t working. Wage cuts were becoming more popular and economically, the U.S was falling apart slowly. Despite the problems, Americans discovered a way to replace the exhausted Americans who no longer took part in labor. Immigrants from Europe were pulled to New York in hope to find what the Americans had said they’d offer.

When some emergency happens, the poor people become unable to pay the rent and often get evicted. How poor people deal with eviction? What are their relationships with each other and with the landlords? These questions Mathew Desmond is trying to answer with his book.

Goodman 4 Richard Goodman English Comp II S. Cravens 5 March 2018 Ending Homelessness Homelessness is everywhere and it’s a growing problem in America. There are many reasons in which become homeless, and many of us ask ourselves should we help the homeless. We must remember that they are people too, and some time or another in life we all need help, even then homeless. In order to end or prevent homelessness, there are a number of things we must fix, the main thing being the affordable housing.

Homelessness is a product of social inequalities. Karl Marx stated that the capitalist society produces two prominent classes which are in conflict with each other, bourgeoisie and proletariats. The bourgeoisie are the oppressors who own the means of production and the proletariats are the oppressed workers who labor for the bourgeoisie. Capitalism is distinguished not by privilege but instead by individuality of property ownership and that those who create the conditions of the oppressed group express this power in the form of laws that function to serve the bourgeoisie’s interests (Marx, 2004, p.129).

Riis alluded to many conditions that those who lived in tenements had to deal with on a daily basis, although his writing was often racist and stereotypical, generalizing many groups of people. However, Riis did do justice to the horrors that the “Other Half” experienced, informing those who did not live there or did not know much about the actual living