How a slum dies: Part 1, in the 19th century
Where do slums go to die? And what kills them?
That question is raised by a provocative new book, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum by Sarah Wise. Although not yet published in the States, and hence unavailable to Your Humble Blogger, it’s the subject of an interesting review in The Sunday (London) Times:
In the 1880s the Old Nichol was
This was the good part of the street: Old Nichol
It was a dense patchwork of about 30 streets and courts north of Bethnal Green Road, with workshops, stables, cowsheds and donkey stalls packed in among rotting, jerry-built late-18th-century houses, and it was home to 5,719 people.
Slums are fertile hunting grounds for anthro-predators. Jack the Ripper operated in the western end of Bethnal Green and in neighboring Whitechapel.
Its “vestry”, or local council, was among the laziest and most corrupt in the capital.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, slums are a wealth-extraction machine, and because of that, every slum has winners . There are always incumbents who benefit:
It persistently opposed attempts to make landlords carry out repairs or meet minimum sanitation requirements, invoking in its defence the sanctity of private property, a Victorian shibboleth.
Those who use the language of reform to prevent reform are, in my personal slum circles of hell , among the lowest rung.
To their inhabitants, the Old Nichol properties were a deathtrap. A quarter of the children born died within their first year.
Squeeze that many people into that small a space, deny them personal toilets or a reliable clean water supply, and the slum cannot be hygienic. People will breed, and they will die, both in huge numbers.
But they were goldmines to those who owned or leased and sublet them, yielding profits of up to 150% on investments.
Slums are economically rational; they represent a trade between those who want to pay the absolute lowest possible for their housing, and those who are willing to provide the minimum accommodation thinkable in exchange for the most primitive de facto security of tenure. To achieve this state of mind, the large-scale slumlord must, out of psychological necessity, persuade himself that the slumdwellers are ‘those’ people, people not like us, people who know no difference, people of whom nothing can be expected.
What can you expect from such people?
Further, because the actual interaction with residents is distasteful to those with large capital sums, they develop a multi-layered hierarchy of intermediaries, many of whom are doing little other than selling protection from the others.
These fortunate speculators included peers of the realm, lawyers, the Church of England, and several of the Old Nichol’s most prominent vestrymen.
Who better to oppose reform but those who profit from the status quo?
Me!
Not only are the slums rational, so too are the slumdwellers; because housing demand is elastic, people pay only what they can afford to pay, and slum rents reach an equilibrium at what can be paid by the poorest of the poor. Consider:
One reported case is of a widow who supported her children and aged mother by making matchboxes. She collected wood, labels and sandpaper from the Bryant and May depot nearby, but had to supply her own glue.
Slum washerwomen
Modern slums in the global south have ragpickers, as they are known.
The suburban equivalent are those folks who are out and about, at five o’clock on garbage pickup day, wheeling a rickety supermarket shopping cart along and rummaging through recycling bins for the nickel-refund plastic or glass bottles.
For every gross (144) boxes she was paid twopence farthing. The quickest makers could manage eight gross a day, earning 1s 6d, which was half the weekly rent for the family’s single room.
If the matchbox maker worked six days a week, she was paying 33% of her income for housing (1 / (½ x 6)). Remarkably, this is almost exactly where one would expect the affordability ratio to be – even in modern times, most people pay about 30-35% of their household income for accommodation.
Sometimes the smaller children, if they could bear their hunger no longer, would eat the glue.
What Wise’s account unexpectedly brings out is the pride and self-respect of the Old Nichol’s residents. They did not think of themselves as slum-dwellers but as people.
That ‘unexpectedly’ rings false. Slumdwelling is a condition, humanity is an intrinsic status. Of course slumdwellers thought of themselves as people, because they either remembered a time before the slum, or imagined a time after the slum. Either way, they are you and I, just with different there-but-for-the-grace-of-God resources and responsibilities, and therefore different choices.
Hard to win without kings and queens and knaves
Conditions that seem to us impossible were accepted as normal.
Impossible? One can find these conditions today in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum.
Children playing
In a two-room tenement that was home to a married couple and their six children, one room was the workshop where the husband and two sons made boot-uppers, the other was the family’s living quarters.
Furniture factory
When you are very poor, you work where you live, because it is about the only secure space you have. Protecting valuables and security of tenure are two of the core benefits of home ownership, even if the ‘ownership’ is purely a sufferance-granted right of indefinite non-eviction.
It had no bed and, asked how they managed at night, the wife explained, “Oh, we sleep about the room as we can.” Even the poorest took out insurance to cover their funerals if they possibly could, since being buried in a pauper’s grave was considered shameful.
I’ve seen something similar in
Big business in
We tend to associate poverty with unemployment and dependence.
Only in developed nations. In developing and emerging nations, it’s associated with –
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
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