No. of Tenement In bad sanitary condition
from
Wards. Houses. any cause.
1 275 175
2 - -
3 40 24
4 500 300
5 300 180
6 600 360
7 1847 890
8 850 546
9 60 434
10 430 196
11 2400 1200
12 208 104
13 550 275
14 550 346
15 200 132
16 1300 433
17 2305 1138
18 & 21 2276 1516
19 761 380
20 1250 417
22 1200 800
Total 18582 9846
The reader will no doubt suppose that the inmates of these houses are
compelled to remain in them because of extreme poverty. This is not the
case. The tenement houses are occupied mainly by the honest laboring
population of New York, who receive fair wages for their work. They herd
here because the rents of single houses are either out of proportion to,
or beyond their means, and because they are convenient to their work.
They are not paupers, but they cannot afford the fearful cost of a
separate home, and they are forced to resort to this mode of life in
order to live with any degree of comfort. Many of the most skilled
mechanics, many of the best paid operatives of both sexes, who are
earning comfortable wages, are forced to live in these vast barracks,
simply because the bare rent of an empty house in a moderately decent
neighborhood, is from $1000 upward. Did the city possess some means of
rapid transit between its upper and lower extremities, which would
prevent the loss of the time now wasted in traversing the length of the
island, there can be no doubt that the tenement sections would soon be
thinned out.
Ther
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