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Some crises never seem to change, and in New York, it’s our housing crisis. For those of low income, there simply isn’t enough that’s affordable. We declared a housing emergency after World War II — that’s when rent control started — and, as a matter of law, it officially continues. 

But, memo to incoming Mayor Eric Adams: We can’t subsidize our way to affordable housing. Only more supply will do it — and that means returning to a formula we’ve forgotten: small buildings on small lots. Density and lots of it. We used to be good at it; that’s what the thousands of attached houses in Brooklyn rely on. But somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves that private builders could never adequately serve the poor. 

It’s a mistake that dates back more than a century — and can be traced to one of the city’s housing heroes, muckraker Jacob Riis. 

It might seem like heresy to raise questions about Riis. The legendary reformer cast his camera’s spotlight on the seedy tenement life of the Lower East Side in his 1890 photojournalism classic, “How the Other Half Lives.” When the New-York Historical Society announced it had purchased a first edition of the book, with the author’s own annotations, it lauded the immigrant Danish one-time carpenter as one who “documented the systemic failure of tenement housing alongside greed and neglect from the wealthy.” 

Now that Riis lives on in the name of a public housing project in a system that comprises the city’s worst current slums, a good case can be made that he went too far. He chose to see only the worst of the city’s poor neighborhoods and their private property owners. In doing so, he set the country on an ill-conceived path — the belief that only government can provide housing for the poor. 

There is no doubt that the late 19th century Lower East Side was crowded, dark and dirty, as some 700 residents per acre crowded into apartments. For Riis, this was a scandal, writing of one building: “The wolf knocks loudly at the gate in the troubled dreams that come to this alley; a horde of dirty children play about its dripping hydrant. These are the children of the tenements, the growing generation of the slums.” 

Some building code changes, which Riis advocated for, were warranted. “New law” tenements would later put an end to new buildings where sunlight never penetrated. But Riis overlooked a great deal. As his recent biographer, Tom Buk-Swienty, put it: “There was more to the slums than abject poverty. Hundreds of thousands of families lived relatively normal lives. They worked, although usually under deplorable conditions, paid rent, fed their children and had hopes and dreams for the future. For a large number of immigrants ... life in the tenements was an improvement on their old lives, offering a more dignified existence.” 

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This truth is absent in “How the Other Half Lives.” Indeed, Riis’ book includes no voices of the poor themselves. The slow daily ascent of the city’s least fortunate did not interest him. 

Before he gained renown as a reformer, Riis was a sensationalist police reporter for the New York Tribune, with headlines that blared “A Body Entirely Nude,” “Murder’s Strange Tools,” “The River’s Unknown Dead.” As Riis himself would write: “Death and mayhem sold papers.” Along with his flash photographs, he appealed not to the poor, but to the wealthy with stories and images that shocked. 

His readers had no way of knowing that the Lower East Side was not a life sentence — it was a way station. By the 1930s, Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement House would remark on the large numbers of “empties” on the Lower East Side, as immigrants and their children had moved up and out — across the Williamsburg Bridge to their own row houses, later to Brownsville or the Grand Concourse. 

We still live with the fallout from Riis and his implicit theme: Poor neighborhoods are bad neighborhoods. This ideology led to the urban renewal wrecking ball that cleared many thriving, working-class neighborhoods across America. Today, the city’s massive public housing construction has left the present-day poor in conditions far more abject than those of the Riis era, because so many live in terror of violent crime without dreams of improvement. 

This is not to say that government should never intervene to improve the living conditions of the poor. The city’s actions during the Riis era provide a better model than replacing private ownership: Public baths offered hygiene for those without their own bathrooms; well-maintained public parks gave places other than alleys for children to play; public schools actually educated students. These are what economists call public goods — the type of infrastructure that really improves the lives of those of modest means. 

There is no doubt that Jacob Riis is an important historical figure. His work deserves to be preserved by the Historical Society. But that doesn’t mean he was right. 

This excerpt has been adapted from Howard Husock’s “The Poor Side of Town — And Why We Need It” (Encounter Books), out now.

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