Reflections on Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives

Jacob Riis’s historically significant work, “How the Other Half Lives” (1890) was an extensive study of a population that had up until then been largely invisible to the public: the urban poor of New York City. In a series of often disturbing photographs and evocative text, he examined the plight of the inhabitants of slums and tenements, as well as the many that lived on the streets. In particular, he examined the huge problem of a massive and growing population of impoverished children and youths, many of whom had no means of support other than begging and thievery. His basic argument was that the social problems of the slums were a direct effect of the miserable living conditions there.

The title of the work refers to the fact that to the upper and middle classes, the conditions in which the bottom half lived were largely unknown. (It was also a take on the saying by Rabelais: “One half of the world does not know how the other half lives.”) No doubt, this was due in part to upper-class society’s deliberate refusal to acknowledge the problem, but also, no exposé such as this had ever been done before. Riis was a pioneer in photojournalism, a style of reportage that depended on the new technology of flash photography, which enabled the candid shots that gave the work its authenticity. Those in power initially had a negative reaction to the book and tried to suppress its publication, but it soon became extremely popular and was credited with starting a massive reform movement that culminated in the tearing down of the worst tenements and then providing solutions to the poor of New York City with better living conditions, such as indoor plumbing and the ease of overcrowding.

Riis’s thesis was that the crime, poverty, and drunkenness that were rampant in the slum areas were a direct result of the conditions in which the inhabitants were forced to live. He blamed the rich landlords who owned the properties for exploiting the poor, as they crammed more and more people into smaller and smaller spaces. He noted that the original cause of overcrowding was that the demand for housing far exceeded the supply in what was (and still is) a sharply limited geographical area: “It was the stir and bustle of trade, together with the tremendous immigration that followed upon the war of 1812 that dislodged them. In thirty-five years the city of less than a hundred thousand came to harbor half a million souls, for whom homes had to be found” (Riis Ch.1). However, this did not fully explain or excuse the practice of renting out practically any space, no matter how tiny, cramped, or squalid, for what were exorbitant rents for the time (again, this is reminiscent of current-day rental conditions in Manhattan, where a 200 square foot “apartment” rents for $2500/month). The real problem was that the poor had no power, and that if they didn’t like their living conditions, there was always someone eager to replace them.

Riis also noted that the high demand for jobs placed the poor at a disadvantage. Employers routinely abused employees, not only underpaying them but stealing back large portions of their wages for trivial “offenses,” such as fainting from the heat in unventilated sweatshops. Single women were often the worst off of all, because they could only earn the lowest wage that women in general were willing to accept, even though, as Riis pointed out, many were “…not wholly dependent upon their own labor, while contributing by it to the family's earnings…it is characteristic of the situation that the very fact that some need not starve on their wages condemns the rest to that fate” (Riis Ch. 20). The fact that families often needed to have all members working just to survive led to the widespread employment of children, some as young as six years old. Riis noted that “The rescue of the children is the key to the problem of city poverty” (Ch. 15) and decried the lack of opportunity for these children to attend school due to overcrowding. But just as much of a contributor to child labor was the fact that many families couldn’t survive without all their children working. The low wages paid to the urban poor meant that it was very difficult to support a family.

Riis made one somewhat disturbing observation regarding the cause of the overall problem. He stated that “The causes that operate to obstruct efforts to better the lot of the tenement population are, in our day, largely found among the tenants themselves. This is true particularly of the poorest. They are shiftless, destructive, and stupid; in a word, they are what the tenements have made them” (Riis Ch. 24). This is a jarring contrast to the rest of Riis’s assertions and sounds dangerously close to blaming the victims for their own troubles. This echoes forward to the present-day assertions of conservatives who claim (whether they state it outright or imply it) that the reason that the poor are in their present situation is that they are shiftless and lazy, and therefore, any social welfare problems exacerbate the problem rather than solve it. One wonders if too long wandering the alleys and tenements of New York City had bred in Riis a certain contempt for those he was trying to help.

Nonetheless, it cannot be disputed that Riis shed light on a major problem and that his book was a major force in beginning to solve it. He noted an interesting and true perspective, that creating decent living and working conditions for the poor actually increased the prosperity of society overall, even that of the rich and powerful. In other words, elevating the poor out of slum living was good for business. One cannot help but compare that situation with today’s debates over such issues as raising the minimum wage. The urban poor make better customers when they actually have some money, and decent living conditions make for good business.

Work Cited

Riis, Jacob. (1890). “How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York.