One aspect of the readings that I found interesting was the relationship between tenants and landlords and its influence in the development of neighborhoods within the city. The first chapters of Mele’s Selling the Lower East Side and Anbinder’s Five Points touch on this aspect concerning the real-estate sector.
Mele and Anbinder suggest that landlords generally act according to profit while tenants care for the community and contribute to its development in a positive way. For example, Anbinder describes how tenement houses emerged in Five Points by saying, “The owners of old decrepit buildings paid less in taxes than owners of sparkling new structure, providing landlords with additional incentive to subdivide old buildings into many small apartments and spend little or nothing to maintain them” (Anbinder, 18). Anbinder could argue that landlords and real-estate are part of the reason why Five Points became a rundown slum as well as a highly diverse center of immigrants. Also, Mele seems to touch on the image of the “greedy landlord” when he describes the struggle between people involved in real-estate and those who live in the Lower East Side. Mele could argue that the real-estate sector played a role in the representation and transformation of the Lower East Side as well as the placement of residents, the tenants who wanted to defend their neighborhood.
Suppose there was a good-hearted landlord. He or she would have had a bunch of immigrants who didn’t have a lot of money, like the tenants in the Lower East Side and Five Points. How would the landlord handle the maintenance if the people paying rent were new to this country and were working at the very bottom of the economic rum? In one sense, the economic prosperity of the city depends on the people who are not only working in factories but people who are able to support the infrastructure, the neighborhood itself. Those people who own the buildings, the landlords, are the previous wave of immigrants. So, the greedy landlord picture isn’t necessarily a fair estimation.
Another interesting point was the political component associated with the real-estate aspect and its influence in the development of neighborhoods. If a person set out to help a group of people, that person would have to know what influences there are. He or she would need to know who the stakeholders are in the neighborhood, who wants it to stay the same, who wants it to change, how the state laws relative to tenants and landlords influence the neighborhood, and how voters influence who can do what to whom. In older times when there were a lot of immigrants but few who voted, landlords and political machines had a lot of power in controlling the development of the neighborhood. Now the opposite is true. Judges and legislators are voted into and out of office by immigrant voters based largely on how well they handle landlord-tenant laws. Because the tenants have more clout, they tend to have more influence in their neighborhood.
