With the Irish, as with
the Jews, most immigrants crossed the ocean with their passages
paid by members of their respective groups living in America. So
did many people from other immigrant groups. Some of the worst
housing conditions were endured by Italian men, living up to ten
to a room and sending money back to their families in Italy.
Reformers who reacted to the slums before their eyes, and to
their own sense of social injustice, had nothing to force them to
face the trade-offs inescapably faced by the people living in those
slums. Even the fact that slum-dwellers often joined with slum
landlords to physically resist being evicted by the authorities
from housing declared “sub-standard” did not cause Jacob Riis
or many other reformers to reconsider whether what they were
doing was really in the best interests of the people whose interests
they were ostensibly protecting. It is all too easy for people
with more formal schooling to believe that they know better
than those directly concerned.
It is equally easy for others, a hundred years later, to say complacently
that “in the long run” it was better for these slums to
disappear, so that housing reform was a success, after all.
Indeed, reformers at the time often made “before” and “after”
comparisons of the housing in which people lived, concluding
that these reforms had made those people better off. Yet both
comparisons stop far short of proving what they imagine that
they prove.
-Thomas Sowell
