Kill the Poor : Low-Rent Aesthetics and the New Housing Order

Abstract

In the discussion of houses and housing in New York City, all roads lead to Jacob Riis’s social and documentarian project published in 1890. Exactly a century before the 1980s housing blight, Riis documented the Fourth Ward Slums in How the Other Half Lives, the much-praised recording of his inner city flâneries and, more significantly, the writing imperative of the first widespread housing epidemic during the 1880s. At the time, he astutely placed the tenement at the heart of the city’s real problems whilst he also identified it, quite insightfully, with the very solution to those problems: “The tenement has come to stay,” writes Riis, “and must itself be the solution of the problem with which it confronts us. This is the fact from which we cannot get away however we may deplore it.”¹ Not only does Riis’s dictum point to the cyclicality of crises in the housing sector, which the writings of the time ought to take heed of, and in so doing, “harvest the justice,” but his statement also equates the state of the tenement with a perennial state of decline. As the tenement in the 1880s was a new piece in New York’s architecture of residence and already riddled with crisis, the dwellers’ active resolution to the tenement problem turned out to be a rather difficult and almost impossible socio-spatial achievement, since the factors that determined any remedial work were mostly extralocal, economic, and political.

“What makes this city great is not the yet-to-be-built worldfinancial centre, it is the neighborhoods of this city with people of every economic class, every race and hue,” said Bonnie Brower, executive director of the Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers, repeating an argument heard around the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

—“No Simple Way for the City to End Housing Burden,” New York Times, 1983