Tenement Housing Models

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The purpose of the paper is to outline the reasons for development of tenement housing models and its outcomes in late nineteenth century in London and New York City. Towards the end of eighteen hundreds metropolitan cities were faced with enormous plight of overpopulation, disease, poverty, crime, lack of accommodation and social unrest. Most of the city inhabitants were forced to pauperdom living conditions without ability to move out or change their circumstances. Terrifying conditions of city dwellers were depicted in Andrew Mearns’s pamphlet called The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: 'Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often two. In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports finding a father, mother, three children, and four pigs! In another a missionary found a man ill with smallpox, his wife just recovering from her eighth confinement, and the children running about half naked and covered with filth. Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen, and a little child lying dead in the same room. Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children, and a child who has been dead thirteen days. Her husband, who was a cab driver, had shortly before committed suicide'. Mearn’s survey had an impact in setting in motion the appointment of Royal Commission which embraced Torrents Act of 1868 which allowed local authorities to build new dwellings for laboring class and Cross Act of 1875 to clear large areas of unfit housing and to remove its inhabitants. ‘The housing problem was central to the social problem of London in the 1880s’ and redevelopment of substantial areas for lodging was imperative. The project was to include ‘separate houses or cottages for the working classes, wether containing one or several tenements’. The situation in New York City was characterized by very same issues afflicting London. The wide exposure of the

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