That is the first cause of the slums of New York City—property-owners like that woman.
In my district as inspector of dog licenses I met with one tenement-owner who did not increase his rent during the housing crisis in New York. He owned ten or more houses of six or ten flats each in the lower part of my district, and between First Avenue and the river. They were so much better kept than the property surrounding them that the instant I put my foot in the door I recognized them as belonging to this man.
The last time I called on the dogs in those houses I was assured by the janitor and the tenants that they had not had a raise in rent for more than ten years. In several of this man’s houses tenants and janitors told me there hadn’t been a change in more than twenty years. One janitor who had cared for one of his houses for thirty years said she hadn’t had as many as a dozen new tenants in all that time.
Though I tried several times to see this house-owner for the sake of asking him how he managed to make money when every other real-estate owner was piling on rent, I never got any nearer him than his sister, who lives with him. This woman assured me that her brother did make his tenement property pay, pay well.
Her brother had found, she told me, that keeping his houses in good repair, and under the care of a courteous, clean janitor, insured his keeping respectable tenants. By respectable, she explained, her brother meant persons who held down their jobs, paid their rent promptly, and did not make a business of destroying the property. He took in any nationality so long as they were the right sort of persons.
The enormous increase of crime, the so-called “crime wave,” was brought about by congestion in the tenement districts more than by any other one cause. Children and young people, being forced out of their homes by over-crowding, spent their evenings on the streets, or in any public place open to an empty pocketbook.
It was impossible for parents to keep track of their children, boys or girls, once the child got large enough to go around alone. Often this was a relief to the mother of the family, especially when her brood did not get on harmoniously.
“I’m glad to see ’em go,” one tenement mother confided to me. “Yet I can’t tell youse how anxious I am until I gits ’em back. There ain’t no room for ’em here, scrappin’ and all but fightin’ like they does; but once they’re out of my sight I dunno who’ll git ’old of ’em, or where they’ll go.”
In the upper part of my district I crossed the trail of at least a dozen different bands of juvenile thieves. One band when it first came to my notice was made up of two girls, neither of them fourteen years old, and both daughters of respectable, hard-working parents.
These two children began by playing hooky from school, climbing fire-escapes, and taking small articles from flats where the windows had been carelessly left unfastened. Growing bolder, they would strip a flat and lug the contents, bedding, clothing, and small articles, across the roofs to a different street, thence to a corner in a cellar which they had found temporarily unused.