Slums

Slums. The word “slum” originated as an East London slang term, probably in the early nineteenth century. By 1850, in both England and America, “slums” referred to places inhabited by poor people and allegedly characterized by crime, filth, and immorality. Almost always used by outsiders rather than inhabitants of the communities so labeled, the term connoted (and often confused) both poverty and deviance.

Two late nineteenth‐century developments combined to raise the term from slang usage to a potent and controversial word in the vocabulary of urban reformers. First, the explosive growth of working‐class housing districts of industrial cities, characterized by miles of multifamily housing and occupied by poor immigrants, prompted affluent urbanites to apply the term to huge areas. Second was the rise of a movement for housing regulation. From the 1840s on, sanitary investigations highlighted the link between poor housing and epidemic diseases. In the late nineteenth century, tenement housing reform became a cause in its own right. Jacob Riis's exposés How the Other Half Lives (1890) and The Battle with the Slum (1902), fueled pressures for stricter standards of ventilation, density, and plumbing, first in New York City and then in many other places.

Once slums were defined as a public threat, reformers began to consider their removal. Although British and European authorities had experimented with state‐sponsored slum clearance as early as the 1850s, most American tenement reformers initially rejected such use of public authority. But between 1910 and the 1950s, American officials moved at first gingerly and then enthusiastically toward large‐scale slum clearance. Planners such as Harland Bartholomew in St. Louis advocated clearance to allow for coherent, neighborhood redevelopment. Housing reformers such as Edith Elmer Wood of New York became convinced that public, low‐income housing could replace slums. Slum clearance moved onto the legislative agenda in a few states in the 1920s, and gained national visibility during the New Deal Era. The Housing Act of 1937 established the basic structure of a federal subsidy program expanded by the Housing Act of 1949 and the Urban Renewal Program of the 1950s.

Despite its advocates’ best intentions, slum clearance became highly controversial. Clearing slums required mapping and defining them, and clearance advocates of the mid–twentieth century moved away from probing the morality of such areas to studying measurable characteristics such as age of housing, density, and adequacy of plumbing. Still, the selection process at the local level frequently and disproportionately targeted areas of minority residence. Moreover, while in some cases low‐income housing replaced demolished structures, an increasing number of federally funded projects involved commercial or high‐income residential redevelopment.

This trend in turn stoked a backlash, marked by strong protests from African‐American communities and climaxed by the publication of Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. By the mid–1960s, federal authorities had turned away from large‐scale clearance in favor of smaller rehabilitation projects and the word “slum” fell out of favor in policy discussions. Ironically, in the late twentieth century the term was often applied to the federally backed public housing that had been meant to replace older “slums.”
See also Great Society; Immigration; Industrialization; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Progressive Era; Public Health; Sixties, The; Urbanization; Urban Renewal

Bibliography

James Ford , Slums and Housing, with Special Reference to New York City, 1936.
Mark Gelfand , A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965, 1975.
David Ward , Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840–1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto, 1989.

Henry C. Binford