Public Intervention

The first government intervention in housing occurred in an age when the critical problem was health and safety, rather than affordability, though the two are related. In 1892 Congress authorized a commission to investigate the horrible living conditions of the nation's largest cities. Masses of slum dwellers were then condemned to makeshift, life-threatening hovels. The density of New York's Lower East Side—1,000 people per acre—exceeded that of any European or even Asian city; its closest rival was one district in Bombay. During the post-Civil War era, cities on the eastern seaboard were congested with tides of foreign immigrants heaped on top of a native population streaming in from the countryside; by 1900 New York's population had tripled and Boston's more than doubled. The housing have-nots packed themselves tightly into cellars and tenements of appalling squalor, deprived of adequate light, air, heat, and running water. Two or three families typically shared a dwelling unit (often a single room) and scores of families shared an outside toilet.

The 1892 Congressional foray had no legislative sequel; aside from a few very limited emergency measures during World War I, the federal government was not to re-enter the housing arena for some forty years. But its overt concern encouraged an ongoing series of private and, eventually, state and local government initiatives traditionally referred to as the Tenement House Reform movement. The principal result of that movement was the enactment of an array of new or improved building and housing codes, based on considerations of public health. Tuberculosis, diphtheria, and pneumonia were then killer diseases. According to medical knowledge of the time, the surest preventives against these highly contagious diseases were sunshine and air, which meant dwellings with more windows and open space; sanitary plumbing, which meant running water and flush toilets;