Jacob Riis Would Still Feel at Home
“The shacks are built of dry goods boxes, frequently with the addresses of the original owners and the shippers’ mark on the outside,” the Los Angeles Housing Commission wrote in its report to the City Council. These shacks, the report goes on, have ordinary stove pipes poking through the middle of the roof and holes on the sides serving for windows.
Descriptions of shacks and tents without running water or toilet facilities abound. The tents are made of sacking, scrap sheet, iron, tin or any available material set on the bare ground. This outdoor living is possible, the report continues, owing to the mild Los Angeles climate, and necessary because of the high rents.
“Hundred of laborers from Mexico and elsewhere add to the tremendous growth of the city, as well as the many new manufacturing interests, and provide some excuse for slum districts. Uptown people are ignorant of the fact, unable to believe, until they see for themselves, that the land of sunshine has many dark spots.”
The year: 1906.
Jacob Riis, the noted journalist and sociologist of the era, visited these congested districts of Los Angeles and reported that he had seen larger slums but never any worse. Riis found rent rates averaged higher and the conditions worse than in the slums of New York, then considered one of the world’s horrors.
Riis’ findings led Mayor Owen McAleer to appoint the city’s first housing commission, which wrestled with many of the same problems we confront today. High rents for a very poor class of housing caused overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, attributed by the commission to “the greed of the landlord or the fictitious value of the land.” Sound familiar?
I explored this history recently because of the ongoing city efforts to tackle the housing crisis. A City Council committee is expected to consider a proposal to establish a new housing commission, an idea advanced by the Mayor’s Blue Ribbon Committee on Affordable Housing.
In 1906 the housing panel’s mission was to remedy housing conditions that were rapidly growing intolerable due to the exceedingly rapid growth of the city at the beginning of the century. The population in 1900 was 100,000.
The commission operated on the assumption that having a home is fundamental. “In our city there are at least 10,000 people who cannot protect themselves from the ignorance or avarice of the strong. Step by step we are determined to go on until housing conditions of our lowliest citizens are improved to the point where a real home is possible.”
The commission labored for seven years, hampered at first by lack of proper legal authority. Their efforts were focused on inspecting “house courts,” erected principally for laborers, and built with complete disregard for the requirements of decency, health and sanitation.
City Council minutes gave scant reference to the commission or to the housing crisis. Requests appear for more inspectors and funds to assist inspectors who must visit the newly acquired territory of San Pedro or Wilmington. Inspectors whose time was too valuable to be used for walking the the considerable distances between projects often were not reimbursed for their 5-cent car fares.
Frustrated by the lack of affordble housing, the commission recommended the formation of an association of public-spirited citizens who would invest small sums to form a stock company to build homes for the working classes. Such a home could be constructed with toilet and plumbing for $250 to $300. The association might also take over the management of rental property. The commissioners took a stern view of the impact of living in ill-lit and poorly ventilated housing, and assumed that improvements would create a more sanitary, healthful and moral life. “Men cannot live like pigs and vote like men.”
These early visionaries saw the city of Los Angeles without tenements, without slums. “Revitalize the city, urbanize the country,” suggests an early commission report. Commission members proposed improved transportation methods, increased factory centers with industrial and garden villages. Alas, their vision was overwhelmed by a population stampede.
On March 25, 1913, the housing commission ceased to exist as an independent body and became part of the city health department. It had become increasingly difficult to secure proper city funds to operate. In 1922 the commission was abolished.
In its final report the panel expressed regrets for unmet goals. It had hoped to continue to gather facts and statistics to change public sentiment to demand decent living places and a living wage for all. “As long as families have to subsist on a dollar a day, or even a dollar and a half, and pay high rent for small quarters, the proper standard of living cannot be maintained.”
As I thumbed through the report of seven years, 1906-1913, and examined the many pictures, I found a distressing similarity to the scenes of the Skid Row encampments in 1989. Tent cities and homelessness remain, caused by inflated real estate values, population pressures, greed and public and governmental indifference.
A new housing commission could help coordinate the efforts of all fragmented programs administered by multiple city departments. If the proposal is adopted, what will be written about its role 80 years from now? This time will it be properly funded and empowered? Or will it, too, lack the tools to lead the city to a dynamic housing policy that would house all our citizens in decent, safe, affordable housing.
