How the Other Half Lives

How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) was an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. It served as a basis for future "muckraking" journalism by exposing the slums to New York City’s upper and middle classes. This work inspired many reforms of working-class housing, both immediately after publication as well as making a lasting impact in today's society.

In the 1890s many people in upper- and middle-class society were unaware of the dangerous conditions in the slums among poor immigrants. After the Civil War, the country transformed into an industrial superpower and became largely urban. Also, a wave of unskilled Southern European, Eastern European, Asian, and Jewish immigrants came to settle in the "promised land" of the United States. This immigrant migration was vastly different from the previous booms due to the influx of non-Western European and non-Protestant individuals, therefore making the split between the "new" and "old" immigrants much larger. In the 1880s, over 5,256,613 immigrants came to the United States, with many of these people staying in New York City. This increased New York City's population 25%, therefore making the tenement problem much more extreme.

In the years after the Civil War, many of the former residents of the most notorious slums were wealthy enough to move out of these conditions, or had died in the war. Also, the elevated railway on the Bowery in 1889 transformed this evolving neighborhood back into the squalid, seedy neighborhood it was before the war, and even made it worse.

The slums were viewed as a problem by people before the publication of How the Other Half Lives. Some political reformers believed that a wider distribution of wealth would fix the problem, while the Socialists believed that public ownership and a redistribution of wealth would fix the problem. National organizations such as the American Red Cross, The National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union were involved in different aspects of the slum problem, but these efforts were local in scope instead of national.

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