Sol Auerbach (James S. Allen) goes back to 1835 and traces the laws passed to meet the housing needs of working class New York; all written for the benefit of the parasite class, with whatever protections routinely violated. As it was, so it is.

‘Century of Fake Housing Measures in New York State’ by Sol Auerbach from the Daily Worker. Vol. 6 No. 52. May 8, 1929.

IF any workers feels inclined to hold out the least bit of hope for relief in the housing situation from legislative quarters, let him remember that ever since 1835 there has been talk by politicians and reformers of relieving the housing situation in New York City and that even today violations of the first tenement law passed in 1867 are rampant.

From 1835 to 1929.

Let him remember that the Tenement House Law of 1901, hailed as an achievement in reform by some people, was so much scrap paper that might just as well have been thrown into the waste-basket standing beside the governor when he signed it.

Let him also remember that the new Multiple Dwellings Bill, which has just been signed by Roosevelt, to take the place of the 1901 law, is nothing but a brazen fake, intended to deceive tenants, but the real purpose of which is to make apartment house building for the rich easier.

The First Fake.

In 1835 the health commissioner of New York City came to the surprising conclusion that there was a direct relationship between slum conditions and disease. The various investigating commissions appointed by the state and city could not help but be struck by the connection between bad housing and contagious disease like smallpox and infectious diseases like tuberculosis.

The first step in the series of fake housing laws was made when the state legislature, in the face of unnecessary opposition from the landlords and real-estate speculators, passed its law of 1867. It is an illuminating education in the bluffing ability of the legislatures of exploiters to study this law.

It is also a good insight into the conditions prevailing at that time, and how little conditions have changed despite that law and others.

Violated Today.

According to this law no building may be occupied as a tenement house unless every sleeping room had a ventilator or transom window of an area of three square feet; unless there were proper fire-escapes; unless there was ventilation in the main hall; there must be no leak in the roof; no less than 1 water-closet to every 20 occupants; yard space must be adequate; no basement or cellar rooms are to be occupied without a permit from the board of health and if occupied they must be seven feet high and have an external window. The building laws called for rooms having at least one window connected with the external air, cemented cellars and fire-proof construction.

Not a single one of these regulations, with the exception of the toilet clause, has been followed generally. Today, in most tenements, you will find at least one violation of the law of 1867.

Amendment Jokes.

In 1879, on the request of reformers, this law was amended to provide that no more than 65 per cent of a lot may be occupied by a building in order to furnish adequate lighting and air. It also provided that sleeping rooms must have 12 square feet opening directly on the public street or yard.

That amendment was a joke. It has been violated “legally.” For the amendment also provided that a building could take up more than 65 per cent of a lot, if the board of health would give its permission. It was a very easy thing to get this “permission” with the result that the board of health saw no danger to “public welfare” by allowing buildings to go up covering 85 to 95 per cent of the lot. As for the ventilation provision, anyone who lives in an old law tenement knows that it is extremely difficult to find an apartment which has all of its rooms looking out into the open.

Lives Mean Nothing.

This provision was often deemed filled when rooms were constructed around a narrow shaftway, a yard wide, running the length of a five or six-story building.

During all this time, and up to the Multiple Dwellings Bill of 1929, buildings were constantly being erected in violation of all the “laws” in existence.

More Jobs.

As the result of the investigation carried on by a commission appointed by the state in 1884, a law was passed in 1887. About all this law accomplished was to hand out 15 more soft jobs to hanger-ons, by increasing the number of sanitary police for the state from 30 to 45. It also assured a constant flood of reports on housing by creating the “Tenement House Commission” to meet once a year. We must not forget, however, that it reduced the allotment of families per toilet from twenty to fifteen.

In the committee to “investigate” housing, appointed by the mayor of New York City in 1887 the leading member was William Waldorf Astor, the landlord of miles of tenements.

The Big Fake.

From then to 1900 there were sporadic attempts at reformist schemes, the “Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor” putting up a few “model” houses on west 68th and 69th Streets, which were model houses for the few who could pay to live in them.

By 1900 conditions in the tenements in New York City had become so bad that they achieved world-wide notoriety. That set the landlords busy again and they had their state housing commission report on conditions that everybody knew of. As a result the Tenement House Law of 1901 was produced. It is supposed to have doomed the double-deck dumbbell apartments (box-like strung out unventilated cages), the community toilets, dark halls, and have made compulsory airshafts to supply air and light to all rooms, fire-proof public halls and stairs, and adequate disposal of garbage, etc.

And Today.

According to this law many of the tenements standing in 1901 are declared unfit for human habitation and should have been demolished. But today, in 1929, nearly all of these tenements are filled to capacity without having gone thru appreciable alterations.

At the beginning of 1928, 554,067 apartments in old law tenements (those built before the 1901 law went into effect) were occupied, housing about 2,500,000 people.

A Better One.

If you think that this is a good example of how little laws really count when passed and administered by a capitalist government, there is a still better one that even Clarence Stein, of the State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, had to admit. In 1885 the New York Tenement House Commission reported as a “public menace” 23 tenements “covering 100 per cent of the lot and at the same time situated in middle of the block, in which the bedrooms are totally dark wit no ventilation whatever.” Now, 40 years later, 14 of these are still occupied. “There are thousands of similar tenements in New York City,” says Stein.

The Tenement House Law went thru 150 amendments before the Multiple Dwellings Bill took its place in 1929. In spite of this law and its 150 amendments, 40 per cent of the families in New York City live in old law tenements, and Barry Parker, a housing expert for the British government, who has seen and investigated slums in every part of the world including Dublin and London, says:

Worst in World.

“The condition of life in any slums I have ever seen are better than they are in the slums of New York.” At present at the rate with which the old law tenements are being withdrawn from use, it would take more than a 100 years to get rid of them.

A Scrap of Paper.

THE Multiple Dwellings Law, which was finally signed by Governor Roosevelt last month, after two years of wrangling among real estate men and landlords and after having been used in political maneuvers in the state legislature, is the most useless scrap of paper ever filed.

Two years ago the state legislature formed a commission to examine and revise the Tenement House Law. As a result of the activities of this commission the Dwellings Bill was offered last year and defeated because of the objections raised by the representatives of realty interests. What the realty interests wanted was an annulment of the law of 1901 and legislation that would permit them to build higher class apartments with as little restriction as possible.

Landlords Approve It.

Accordingly, three additional members, appointed by the real estate boards of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, were added to the commission and redrafted the law in such a way that it received the united support of the real estate and landlord interests. That means, of course, that the law provides absolutely no changes for the tenements in which the mass of workers are housed. What the bill does do is allow greater bulk to buildings, raising the permitted height of apartment houses and it is so vague in regards to light provisions that under it buildings can be built even below the minimum provided in the law of 1901.

Tenement Law for Rich.

The respectable citizens of this commission seemed to forget entirely about the old law tenements which make tenement conditions what they are. Even Clarence Stein, who is unusually honest for a state investigator, is forced to admit that “in regard to these buildings the proposed law does nothing or next to nothing,” and he calls it a “tenement house law for the rich.”

Even if the changes called for in this law are made “a large part of the rooms will still have no outside means of ventilation; the stairways will not be protected from fire; the fire-escapes will not serve as a safe means of escape; there will be no privacy or safety from disease in the toilets,” says Stein.

That is the new housing law that was passed by the state legislature, signed by the governor. Like all the others passed before it, it is a fake, designed with the double purpose of fooling the workers and helping the landlords.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist.

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