An immigrant city: Urban Population Explosion

Housing Stress in emerging New York City

 

New York was the biggest harbor in the United States from the very beginning. That meant that the biggest immigration was coming to the United States through this city. Foreign-born made up one-third of the New York population. With these many people settling in the city, comes a lot of problems with overpopulation. First one related to the lack of windows. Then, we have a house lot size and its change from single to the multi-family house. And, the importance of lights and air and its distribution and impact on life quality.

To make the most profit of its property, early house owners did not care about the tenants. They rent their rooms and basements, and small backyard barracks to several people. Those houses did not have daily sun exposure, nor sun ever penetrate those places. Also, the buildings were too close to each other and set the shade on other houses even though they have windows, so there was no chance for light to go through those windows.

The problem also exists with the property lot size and with the height of the buildings. The lot size was 25x 100 feet. Everybody tries to use all that space and did not allow space for windows, of for natural air ventilation. That help in developing the epidemic diseases. Also, there was no control of how much height certain building can have, and that produce overdevelopment.

All these things create an unhealthy and inhuman situation for the tenants and jeopardize the whole city. The area in Manhattan between Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge was called “Lung Block” because it has a high tuberculosis mortality rate caused by unhealthy and overcrowded place for living.

With a lot of sacrifice from the immigrants over the years, the city manages to improve living conditions step by step to create a healthy environment for its citizens. New legislations pass to improve housing, like every house and building need to have ventilation, halls, and stairways in case of fire, fire escapes, running water in every apartment, garbage receptacles, no cesspools, windows in every room open to yard or street. Every apartment needs to have heat from a fireplace or some other source of heat.  City legislation also changes the rule for the number of people per toilet. It goes from 20 people on one toilet, to have a toilet in every apartment. They also limit the height of buildings related to the streets. Without these changes and improvements, the city will never prevail.