“A Moden Day Scandal”

When immigrants were coming here in the 1900s, many of them used to live in tenements. These tenements featured the worst living conditions possible on the Earth. People did not have plumbing, electricity, or even the right sewage systems that would handle the number of families living in the tenements. The dimensions of the rooms were small, and many times, the rooms were overcrowded because the landlords asked for high rents. People could not afford these so they took in boarders. When reformist exposes, such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, started getting published, people finally learned the truth. It wasn’t the immigrants who were these horrible and cruel people, but the landlords and the business owners. The immigrants were exploited. They were fully taken advantage of. But due to the exposes, the conditions finally began to get somewhat better.
This must mean that immigrants today probably have it a lot better. They must own homes or apartments with private bathrooms. They must be happy, right? Well, that actually isn’t the case. Nancy Foner states that housing conditions are just as bad today as they were back then. These people are stuck in the types of conditions that Jacob Riis was trying to eliminate by exposing the truth, as said by one journalist. About ten- to fifty-thousand immigrants live in these “cubicles illegally carved out of the basements of private homes and apartment houses, with little light or ventilation and inadequate mans of escape.” One of the places described in East Flatbush has six 5-by-8 cubbyholes, a communal bathroom and kitchen area, cold water in the shower, and dripping pipes in the corridor. People are living in places without heat and places infested with rats. I was shocked while I was reading this. I know that some immigrants today still do have hard lives when they first come here because they don’t have a lot of money, but I expected the housing conditions for contemporary immigrants to be much better. I didn’t think they would be like the conditions immigrants lived in in the 1900s. It was definitely a shock because the standard of life is steadily increasing, but these standards are not increasing for everyone. People should not be living in these abysmal conditions, at least not in today’s day and age.