During the late eighteen hundreds, the population increased rapidly and almost half the population was being made up of immigrants. Landowners took advantage of this influx of people, seeing the provision of housing as an opportunity to make a lot of money. Due to this greed, several problems began to surface for immigrants and the working poor who couldn’t offered better housing and had to put up with horrid conditions.

Many factors gave rise to the housing crisis for immigrants and the working poor. One reason being that the homeowners would cramp up far too many people into one building and still have tenants living in basements and cellars. Most of the time these owners had maxed out how many people they could fit in one piece of land only to gain as much money as they possibly could from their tenants. This resulted in a degradation of air quality. Another reason was sanitation problems persisting not only within the immigrants houses but also on the streets. For example, horse manure and even the bodies of deceased horses could be found on the sides of streets/roads and nobody would clean it off the streets for days or even weeks at a time. Another sanitation issue was that if the house had a bathroom inside, most of the time a large number of people, if not all the tenants, shared that same bathroom. If the bathroom was located outside the house, all there was to it was a hole dug on the ground which after a while would fill up creating the need for a new hole and in turn creating several areas where human waste was buried. That along with the manure of horse and their carcasses created intolerable stenches that were unsanitary for the people near it. Another major issue was the lack of ambient light due to the fact that houses would take up almost the entire lot of land. Houses were being built back to back and side to side all for the profit of homeowners and to the ruin of their tenants.

A lot was needed to be done to fix the horrid conditions in which tenants in the eighteen hundreds were expected to live in. For example, the amount of people to a house and even a room needed to be regulated in order to prevent overcrowding and improve air quality within houses. Not only that but also to restrict homeowners from placing tenants in cellars and basements because those areas of the house provided little to no fenestration or fresh air. Regulations for sanitation also had to be implemented because the streets were really dirty to the point that some became inaccessible or just too disgusting for someone to even want to pass through.

This crisis mirrors current conditions of housing in New York in that although it’s illegal unless approved by DOB, homeowners still rent basements/ cellars for people to live in. Not only that but the sense of over-crowdedness is still present, people with low income struggle to make rent and find themselves sharing one bedroom apartments. Over-crowdedness also in the sense that spaces are becoming smaller, in order to make more apartments/ spaces to house more people and collect more money. In that aspect, I don’t believe much has changed.