What, then, are the bald facts with which we have to deal in New York?
I. That we have a tremendous, ever swelling crowd of wage-earners which it is our business to house decently.
II. That it is not housed decently.
III. That it must be so housed here for the present, and for a long time to come, all schemes of suburban relief being as yet utopian, impracticable.
IV. That it pays high enough rents to entitle it to be so housed, as a right.
V. That nothing but our own slothfulness is in the way of so housing it, since “the condition of the tenants is in advance of the condition of the houses which they occupy” (Report of Tenement-house Commission).
VI. That the security of the one no less than of the other half demands, on sanitary, moral, and economic grounds, that it be decently housed.
VII. That it will pay to do it. As an investment, I mean, and in hard cash. This I shall immediately proceed to prove.
VIII. That the tenement has come to stay, and must itself be the solution of the problem with which it confronts us.
This is the fact from which we cannot get away, however we may deplore it. Doubtless the best would be to get rid of it altogether; but as we cannot, all argument on that score may at this time be dismissed as idle. The practical question is what to do with the tenement. I watched a Mott Street landlord, the owner of a row of barracks that have made no end of trouble for the health authorities for twenty years, solve that question for himself the other day. His way was to give the wretched pile a coat of paint, and put a gorgeous tin cornice on with the year 1890 in letters a yard long. From where I stood watching the operation, I looked down upon the same dirty crowds camping on the roof, foremost among them an Italian mother with two stark-naked children who had apparently never made the acquaintance of a wash-tub. That was a landlord’s way, and will not get us out of the mire.