Social legislation and social activity

by American Academy of Political and Social Science

When Theodore Roosevelt, then Governor of the State of New York, attended the opening of the Tenement House Exhibition of the Charity Organization Society of New York, and looked over the models of tenements, old and new, and the charts which showed the close connection between the housing of the vast majority of that city’s population, and health, pauperism and crime, he said to the few of us who had organized this exhibition—“Tell us at Albany what to do, and we will do it.” The result was the New York State Tenement House Commission of 1900, the enactment last year of the most advanced code of tenement house laws as yet put in force in any American city, and the creation for the first time in this country of a department directly charged with the oversight of the construction and proper maintenance of tenement houses.

The tenement house problem we had to meet in New York was the most serious of any city in the civilized world, for in New York, according to the last census, out of 3,437,202 inhabitants, 2,273,079, or more than two-thirds, lived in tenement houses, and there were 82,652 of these tenements in the city.

The interest in this particular phase of the housing question is not confined to New York. No one who has followed, even carelessly, public opinion on this subject can fail to realize the hold it has upon the public conscience. It may be that some tremble at the effect upon their own fortunes of a possible social revolution, and seek to protect themselves, for their own sake, by trying to make what they call the lower classes more comfortable in their homes. But the large body of men and women in this country who are giving to this subject attention, are doing so from love of their fellow-men, and an earnest desire to give them in their homes some of the healthful surroundings and comforts they enjoy in their own.

There are few large cities in America in which there is not some tenement regulation, and some agitation for its extension. At the moment there is an active movement in Boston for the appointment of a commission to frame a new code of tenement house laws for that city. There is a similar movement in Chicago and in Cincinnati. Nor is this activity confined to the larger cities. Kansas City in the West, Hartford in the East, Yonkers, Syracuse and Rochester in New York, are already moving in the same direction, and the subject is receiving close attention in Washington, Cleveland and Pittsburg.

The New York law of last winter was a state law applicable to all cities of the first class. It included Buffalo as well as New York, and Buffalo did its full part in securing the enactment of the law. Philadelphia is emphatically the City of Homes, and not of tenements. Fortunately for Philadelphia, its working classes are almost exclusively housed in single family dwellings. It has, as most of you know, an admirable code of tenement house laws, which has proved very useful to us at New York in preparing ours, and it has its Octavia Hill Association to advance the cause of housing reform.

In some quarters benevolent people are proposing to build model tenements. That is good as far as it goes, but if at the same time other people, not benevolent, who have no motive but gain for themselves, are permitted to build tenements which are not models, the extent of progress is very limited. What we must do, first and foremost, is to secure proper legislation, using that term in its broadest sense, to include city ordinance, as well as state law. Legislation to regulate building, so as to secure for new buildings proper air and light space and proper sanitation; legislation to regulate, in buildings old and new, their maintenance so that health conditions may be improved and at least not be impaired; legislation, moreover, that provides the means for its own enforcement, by proper inspection.

Most of us have been brought up to believe that, as owners of real estate, we could build on it what we pleased, build as high as we pleased, and sink our buildings as low as we pleased. Our ideas of what constitutes property rights and what constitutes liberty are largely conventional. They vary with time and place. They are different in different countries. Liberty, proper liberty, to-day, may, under changing conditions, become license to-morrow. I came home from Europe not long since with a French friend, who had gone home to his native country to take possession of his ancestral estates. He told me of having found the trees grown up quite thickly around his father’s country home, and of the difficulties he had encountered in obtaining permission from the public authorities to cut down some of them, which was finally only granted on condition that he replanted elsewhere. That his trees could only be cut down with the consent of the public authorities, and that he could properly be required to replant elsewhere as a condition of obtaining that consent, seemed to him a part of the eternal order of things. He no more questioned it in his mind than we, who live in cities, question the propriety of obtaining from the city building department a permit to build, based upon approval of our architect’s plans.

Lecky, in one of his later books, speaking of sanitary legislation, says: “Few things are more curious than to observe how rapidly, during the past generation, the love of individual liberty has declined; how contentedly the English race are committing great departments of their lives to the web of regulations restricting and encircling them.” It is not that love of liberty has declined, it is that the English race are meeting new conditions with the same genius with which they have evolved their great system of common law. Living, as most of them did a century ago, in separate houses, and in small villages or towns, every man could build as he pleased and could maintain his building as he pleased without seriously endangering the liberty of his neighbors, but with the steady movement of the population from the country to the city, and the marvelous growth of cities, not only horizontally but vertically, new conditions must be met, and the property rights and liberty of one neighbor must be limited to protect the property rights and liberty of another. If a man built an isolated house in the country, without light or air for the bedrooms, and kept it in such filthy condition as to breed disease, it is a fair question whether his liberty should be infringed by any building or health regulation. He may be fairly left free to suffer the consequences of his own misuse of his liberty. His death, and that of his family, from disease so caused may, as an awful example, do more to advance civilization by making his neighbors more careful, than would his life and theirs under enforced sanitary regulation. But if that same man is separated from you and me only by a board partition or twelveinch wall, and our families meet every time they go into the street or into the back yard, his liberty must be restricted in some degree in order to enable you and me to enjoy ours.

How and why has tenement house law been evolved in American cities? In the same way in which the Anglo-Saxon mind deals with any such problems. Just as it evolved common law, and for the same reasons. First a case—that is, an evil—to be remedied; afterward a decision—the application of the remedy, and the establishment of a principle or law by which similar evils shall be remedied. It is not according to the genius of our race to provide the remedy in advance of the supposed disease. Better be sure that the disease really exists, even if some few die from it, and then provide the remedy which will be sure to meet actual conditions, than to burden the community with advance remedies for diseases that after all may prove to be imaginary. Even if the disease be not imaginary, such remedies are apt to be worse than the disease itself. Thus, in Anglo-Saxon countries, a conflagration has usually preceded precautions against fire, and the evils of sunless, airless and unwholesome tenements have preceded any attempt to prevent these deplorable conditions. Eventually we act, and when we do we act practically.

It may be well to define what is meant by a tenement house, for without definition there is infinite confusion in the use of this term. In one of our recent civil service examinations in New York, a candidate, evidently “learned in the law,” or supposing himself to be so, defined it as being “That which is neither land nor hereditament.” It has its popular and its legal meaning. Popularly, it is used to designate the habitations of the poorest classes, without much thought of the number of families living under any particular roof. The National Cyclopedia significantly says: “Tenement houses, commonly speaking, are the poorest class of apartment houses. They are generally poorly built, without sufficient accommodation for light and ventilation, and are overcrowded. The middle rooms often receive no daylight, and it is not uncommon in them for several families to be crowded into one of their dark and unwholesome rooms. Bad air, want of sunlight and filthy surroundings work the physical ruin of the wretched tenants, while their mental and moral condition is equally lowered. Attempts to reform the evils of tenement life have been going on for some time in many of the great cities of the world.”