Slums

I believe there isn’t a specific person or group of people to be blamed for the dangerous living condition in slums. There could have been people that had the ability to help improve the living conditions in slums, but they didn’t. What is the reason? Money. The world revolves around money; it did then, still does now. Money played a huge part, but there is also a problem, news and information did not travel around easily. To get an article published in the newspaper, you needed the approval of the publishing company and they would have to read it through first. From what I have gathered, Jacob Riis wrote a magazine in 1889 exposing the harsh conditions of New York slums. The city’s rich newspaper owners refused to publish it due to its disturbing pictures and articles. The articles soon became popular and Riis expanded it into a book called How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Upper and middle-class society did not know about the dangerous living conditions of the slums because slums were places they avoided. Back then, transportation and social media was not as advanced, people usually only knew how to get to places they go to every day. They wouldn’t know about the slums because they didn’t have to go to it, go through it or even near it. I believe no one is to be blamed; our population was growing larger and faster than the time it took for news to go around and so no one really knew about the slums until Riis came along and then Colonel George E. Waring Jr, who designed a separated sewer system.