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Audiobook edition · 9 h 17 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens when a city refuses to look at the rooms where its poorest people live?
In How the Other Half Lives, Jacob A. Riis leads you through the crowded tenements of Lower Manhattan. The police reporter knows these streets from years of walking them at night. Through back alleys, cellars and lodging houses, he asks comfortable New Yorkers to face the lives they prefer not to see.
Families sew clothing and make cigars in rooms that serve as both home and workplace. Children sleep in doorways, on gratings and in boxes. Riis argues that poor housing harms the whole city. His reporting presses for reform, while also revealing the period prejudices and blind spots that shape his view.
What you’ll discover
- Behind the tenement walls Follow Riis into crowded rooms and see how housing shapes the lives within.
- A city street by street Walk Mulberry Street and the Bend with a reporter who knows the ground.
- Work without a way out Meet families whose homes become workshops, where poorly paid labor keeps poverty close.
- Children at the sharpest edge Encounter the children whose nights in doorways make the cost of neglect painfully concrete.
- The struggle for better housing Trace early housing laws and weigh Riis's argument that the tenements concern everyone.
Who will love it
This is for readers who love social history, investigative reporting and the story of how cities grow. It also speaks to anyone curious about immigrant New York or the roots of housing reform.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Profit turned homes into tenements
- Crowding keeps poor tenants paying more
- Housing laws leave old damage behind
- Better houses change how people live
- Home and workplace become one trap
- Prejudice becomes a source of rent
- Children need rescue before punishment
- Decent housing can earn honest returns
- Justice in housing connects the evidence
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How the Other Half Lives
by Jacob A. Riis · 1890
A police reporter with a flash camera climbs into New York's tenements and counts who sleeps in every room.
Challenging5–10 hours to read2 languages
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In short
What happens in a room twelve feet square where five families, twenty people, share two beds? Jacob A. Riis cites records of such rooms.
How the Other Half Lives at a glance
- Reading time
- About 5 h 15 min4 h 10 min fast, 6 h 15 min slow
- Length
- 75,500 words
- Library level
- Challenging long sentences, a rich vocabulary
- First published
- 1890by Jacob A. Riis
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Tenements began as carved-up family homes
Riis traces tenements to the homes of old Manhattan families. Trade and a flood of immigrants pushed those families uptown. Agents and boardinghouse keepers took over their houses as the city's population rose over thirty-five years from under one hundred thousand to five hundred thousand.
The new owners split big rooms into small ones with no thought for light or air. Then came the rear house, built in old gardens where Dutch families once grew tulips. Where two families had lived, ten now moved in. Riis points to Gotham Court, where during a cholera epidemic 195 people in every thousand died. Owners later blamed the filth on their tenants, though they had allowed every bit of it.
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Details
- First published
- 1890
- Language
- English
- Level
- Challenging
Cite this edition
Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/how-the-other-half-lives.
Riis, J. A. (2026). How the other half lives. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/how-the-other-half-lives (Original work published 1890)
Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/how-the-other-half-lives.
@book{riis2026how,
author = {Riis, Jacob A.},
title = {How the Other Half Lives},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/how-the-other-half-lives},
note = {First published 1890}
}
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What is How the Other Half Lives about?
It is a study of life in the tenements of New York in 1890. Riis describes how they began, who lived in them, what people paid, how they worked, and what reforms might help.
What does the other half mean in the title?
It refers to the poorer half of the city, living in tenements, whom the comfortable half rarely sees. Riis argues that the boundary between the two halves runs through the tenements.
Is How the Other Half Lives a true story and when was it written?
Yes, it is nonfiction, published in 1890. Riis draws on city records, Health Board and police reports, charity files, and his own visits as a newspaper reporter, and he took photographs in many of the places he describes.
The author
Jacob A. Riis
1849–1914 · Danish-American journalist and photographer
Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914) was a Danish-American journalist and pioneering photographer whose How the Other Half Lives exposed the squalor of New York's tenements and helped ignite the American housing-reform movement. Theodore Roosevelt called him the most useful citizen of New York.
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