Keeping the Tenants Down: Height Restrictions and Manhattan's Tenement House System, 1885-1930
2003; Cato Institute; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1943-3468
Autores Tópico(s)Housing Market and Economics
ResumoBetween 1850 and 1930, New York City commonly is believed to have offered its poor citizens the worst housing conditions of any of the world's major industrialized cities. Historians emphasize the following features: high population density leading to extreme overcrowding of tenements; tenement houses packed together as closely as possible to maximize land use; the dark, disease-ridden, poorly constructed, fire-prone tenements; the minimal level of utility services offered; and the of 19th-century reform efforts. Unfettered capitalism invariably is put forth as the primary cause of all these social ills. (1) A kind of morality play emerges from this interpretation emphasizing the awful price allegedly imposed on the poor by 19th-century urban capitalism. And, as befits a morality play, a crusading hero--Big Government--rises up early in the 20th century to vanquish capitalism's evil excesses. Viewed in this fashion, the tale of Manhattan's tenements is a classic indictment of capitalist institutions and a powerful endorsement of Big Government as the vital counterweight to business's money-grubbing ways. Because the verdict of market failure is so firmly fixed in both the academic and the public mind, it is not surprising that little has been done to reexamine the evidence supporting the idea that New York's 19th- and early 20th-century housing problems are the product of markets, not government. And yet, evidence of government failure is not hard to find once it is looked for. This article focuses on a little-noticed New York building regulation: building height restrictions. Such restrictions began in New York with an 1885 law banning residential buildings higher than 80 feet. They were tinkered with over the next 30 years before being deeply embedded into, and intertwined with, the comprehensive zoning act of 1916 (the nation's first), where they remained in place at least into the 1930s. I argue that these seemingly innocuous regulations had a severe impact retarding progress at the lower end of the New York City housing market. Specifically, they created an environment in which the worst classes of tenements were spared competition that would otherwise have tended to cause their demolition and replacement early in the 20th century. Manhattan's Tenement House Problem Manhattan's tenements were widely regarded by 19th-century commentators as the worst urban housing of their day (e.g., Potter 1889: 158; DeForest and Veiller 1903: 4). This verdict was reached not only because of the sheer scale of the tenement system--hundreds of blocks were given over to unbroken rows of such structures--but also because of the poor quality of living conditions there. Tenements were long, narrow residential buildings, usually from three to five stories in height (DeForest and Veiller 1903: 211), often built specifically for the lower-income groups. (2) Often several hundred people would crowd into a single building, as renters would take in boarders to make ends meet, leading inevitably to conditions that drew the ire of reformers. The first tenement in Manhattan seems to have been built in the 1830s (Burrows and Wallace 1999: 587). By the 1850s, the tenement system was in full swing, as tenements supplanted the ramshackle shanties and carved-up former homes of the well-to-do that formerly had housed Manhattan's poor. Following the Civil War, tenement construction exploded, largely in response to the tides of immigration coming from southern and eastern Europe. By 1900, the overwhelming majority of the poor lived in tenements. (3) In addition, many well-to-do Manhattanites lived in structures of the tenement type: long, narrow, and dark, but with more amenities and space per person than in the poorer districts (Jackson 1976: 80-81). Ownership and management of tenements was, by and large, a small-scale mom-and-pop industry: often the owner of a tenement housing hundreds of immigrants was a former immigrant himself. …
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