Jacob A Riis. in his work How the Other Half Lives, describes the terrible living conditions of the poor in New York. Riis describes why the tenement houses were first built. He then describes all the different inhabitants of these tenements. Then in one of the best chapters of the book he describes why the middle and upper class should care about the problems of the poor. This book was the first ever to expose the conditions of tenement housing. After reading this book Theodore Roosevelt, police commissioner of New York, called on Riis to help improve conditions for the poor.
Riis made an excellent analysis of the conditions of all of the poor in New York. He began by describing the beginnings of the tenements. The people with money living in downtown New York moved to the outskirts of the city. This is the idea of “white flight” in action. The owners of the downtown buildings soon devises a way to make money off of them. They began renting the rooms to the waves of immigrants coming to the city everyday. Riis then describes the awful conditions of the inhabitants of the tenements. Their was no light or fresh air in the buildings. The poor lived in closet like bedrooms with one 10’ X 10’ living room often shared by more than one family. The people living here were lucky if they had all their fingers. Most of the book is taken up by Riis writing of the reaction of the poor to their condition. He writes that the youth of the tenements turned to crime. Juvenile crime rates rose dramatically when the tenements were in operation. One contemporary wrote, “The streets are an asylum for juvenile vagrants.”
The chapter in this book that has had the biggest influence on history is “The Man with the Knife”. The other chapters of the book describe the plight of the poor. The wealthy were still removed of these problems. In “The Man with the Knife” Riis describes a poor man angered at the wealthy. The man takes a knife and stabs a wealthy family on a shopping trip. This chapter hits the problems of the poor home to the wealthy. It tells the wealthy that if they want to remain safe they need to provide for the poor.
This book was well written and it agreed with everything that the textbook said about this period. The book described in harsh detail the condition of the tenements in more depth than the textbook went into. This book also showed why the Progressive movement would soon surface in America.

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