Jacob Riis – How the Other Half Lives (Opinion and Analysis)
In How the Other Half Lives, author Jacob Riis has provided pictures of his main subject – people living in squalor within the area New York City. The photos have served as supplementary materials for all of his readers that actually took interest in the way urban conditions look like during the period. The descriptions Riis has given in discussing details of “the other half” made his written claims more convincing. The visual quality provided by his photos made his accounts more credible (Riis 19).
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Tenement houses, in the view of Riis, are a product of human greed due to increasing consumerism. He describes his views through presenting accounts of the establishment of those structures. Initially, areas where tenement houses have stood were villages filled with people engaging in simple commerce. As the economy stood up, those people benefited from the expansion of consumerism, until real estate owners have driven them off their lands and displaced them inside the tenement houses that they build, with rooms that are small and cramped and public areas that are crowded and filled with vices (Riis 9-10).
Riis described immigrants in the book as a whole, without giving special distinction to those who came from particular countries. For him, immigrants in New York City are only concerned with fighting for survival, which starts by having to get bread each day. He believes that learning how to speak the native language where the immigrants choose to emigrate is an important aspect of their survival. He noted that their ignorance in doing so has disabled them from further progress in the city (Riis 94, 101).
According to the presentation of accounts, Riis may have thought of the urban poor as one that has found disadvantages in the development process – a standpoint subject for wide agreement. Throughout the course of urban development, people have become highly disadvantaged due to the rigors brought by employment and the eventual difficulty of looking for places in the job market. Thus, people whose means to survive have drastically declined to lower levels, have found themselves in poor living conditions- in effect, they have formed part of the urban poor (Riis ix).
Women and children, in the eyes of Riis, are the most disadvantaged personalities in his account. Both of those people are the ones who mostly the role of vagrants in front of tenements. Many women within the tenements have turned out to be crazy as well, as the asylums have constituted a large percentage of women. Some women have taken the direction of becoming tramps, while others took charge of the stale beer dives within the tenements, which became apparent to the author when he joined the police in a raiding mission (Riis 58-59, 187).
Several laws operate to regulate the tenements. In terms of structural concerns, the sanitary law in effect during the time of Riis maintains the cleanliness of new tenements. However, such law does not sanction the demolition of the old tenements in a summary manner. Rather, the authorities could issue express orders allowing them to take those structures down. As for the people living within the tenements, residents live by the charge of vagrancy and illegal operation of dive bars serving stale beer (Riis 19, 187).
For the most part of the account, Riis saw government officials as regulators of the law. Many people within the tenements have seen them as antagonistic to their ways of living, as seen in the stale beer dive raids and arrests made for vagrancy. Another compelling action that prompted tenement residents to view government officials as evil actors is their role as implementers of any new legal regulations. For instance, when the Board urged officials to create more windows in the tenements, the residents sought to drive them away, seeing the action as a move by the government to decrease wage values in the tenements (Riis 17, 58, 187).
Overall, the account of Riis on the other side of New York City has provided a startling revelation to the world on urban decay and poverty. The author described New York City, as it may seem to the minds of many people, not in a glitzy-glamorous light but rather as a place where squalor exists due to several people finding life in the urban jungle drastically difficult. The lack of sufficient opportunities for immigrants have led them to edge on their survival by way of gathering in those tenements they have been living on at the time the author issued his accounts. In brief, the book provides a strong message to people about the difficulties of life in the urban setting, especially for those who believe that milk and honey abound the progressive impression of the city.
Works Cited
Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. New York City, NY: Penguin Book, 2010. Print.
