Keeping the tenants down: height restrictions and Manhattan's tenement house system, 1885-1930.

• Author: Montgomery, Michael R.

Between 1850 and 1930, New York City commonly is believed to have offered its poor citizens the worst housing conditions of any of the world's major industrialized cities. Historians emphasize the following features: high population density leading to extreme overcrowding of tenements; tenement houses packed together as closely as possible to maximize land use; the dark, disease-ridden, poorly constructed, fire-prone tenements; the minimal level of utility services offered; and the failure of 19th-century reform efforts. Unfettered capitalism invariably is put forth as the primary cause of all these social ills. (1)

A kind of morality play emerges from this interpretation emphasizing the awful price allegedly imposed on the poor by 19th-century urban capitalism. And, as befits a morality play, a crusading hero--"Big Government"--rises up early in the 20th century to vanquish capitalism's evil excesses. Viewed in this fashion, the tale of Manhattan's tenements is a classic indictment of capitalist institutions and a powerful endorsement of Big Government as the vital counterweight to business's money-grubbing ways.

Because the verdict of "market failure" is so firmly fixed in both the academic and the public mind, it is not surprising that little has been done to reexamine the evidence supporting the idea that New York's 19th- and early 20th-century housing problems are the product of markets, not government. And yet, evidence of "government failure" is not hard to find once it is looked for.

This article focuses on a little-noticed New York building regulation: building height restrictions. Such restrictions began in New York with an 1885 law banning residential buildings higher than 80 feet. They were tinkered with over the next 30 years before being deeply embedded into, and intertwined with, the comprehensive zoning act of 1916 (the nation's first), where they remained in place at least into the 1930s. I argue that these seemingly innocuous regulations had a severe impact retarding progress at the lower end of the New York City housing market. Specifically, they created an environment in which the worst classes of tenements were spared competition that would otherwise have tended to cause their demolition and replacement early in the 20th century.

Manhattan's Tenement House Problem

Manhattan's tenements were widely regarded by 19th-century commentators as the worst urban housing of their day (e.g., Potter 1889: 158; DeForest and Veiller 1903: 4). This verdict was reached not only because of the sheer scale of the tenement system--hundreds of blocks were given over to unbroken rows of such structures--but also because of the poor quality of living conditions there. Tenements were long, narrow residential buildings, usually from three to five stories in height (DeForest and Veiller 1903: 211), often built specifically for the lower-income groups. (2) Often several hundred people would crowd into a single building, as renters would take in boarders to make ends meet, leading inevitably to conditions that drew the ire of reformers. The first tenement in Manhattan seems to have been built in the 1830s (Burrows and Wallace 1999: 587). By the 1850s, the tenement system was in full swing, as tenements supplanted the ramshackle shanties and carved-up former homes of the well-to-do that formerly had housed Manhattan's poor. Following the Civil War, tenement construction exploded, largely in response to the tides of immigration coming from southern and eastern Europe. By 1900, the overwhelming majority of the poor lived in tenements. (3) In addition, many well-to-do Manhattanites lived in structures of the tenement type: long, narrow, and dark, but with more amenities and space per person than in the poorer districts (Jackson 1976: 80-81).

Ownership and management of tenements was, by and large, a small-scale "mom-and-pop industry": often the owner of a tenement housing hundreds of immigrants was a former immigrant himself. In these days before well-developed mortgage markets, funding was limited, and the financially strapped owner often was not in a position to build on more than a single lot in Manhattan's expensive real estate market. The minority of owners building on multiple adjacent lots typically chose to build duplicate autonomous structures on each lot rather than gamble on a larger structure that, presumably, would be less liquid in case of sale (presumably, this also was a means of hedging one's bets against the ever-present risk of fire).

Given the strong tendency to build tenements on single lots, difficult quality-of-housing problems emerged in the tenement districts. These problems largely stemmed, remarkably, from decisions made in 1811, when the city imposed a uniform lot size of 25-by-100 feet on all real estate (roughly) north of 14th Street (the approximate extent of development in 1811). (4) As the city expanded northward during the 19th century, all development had to be fitted into the 25-by-100 straitjacket. The lot size was inappropriate from the standpoint of housing the urban poor for three reasons. First, 2,500 square feet was too large a plot of land to be affordable to the typical urban homesteader of small-to-moderate means, an intractable economic fact that promoted the development of the tenement system instead of single-family homes. Second, it was such a large investment for the tenement builder/speculator that economics virtually demanded that as much of the lot as feasible should be covered by one's building (often, lot-coverage well above 75 percent was achieved).

Third, the long, narrow shape of such a lot virtually mandated that a long, narrow building be built. Rooms in the center areas of tenements thus tended to be undersupplied with "light and air"--such rooms, in fact, often were windowless. Any light that did exist rapidly disappeared as adjoining lots were built up with other tenements, creating whole blocks where the typical room was dark, damp, poorly ventilated, and (often) disease ridden. This environment must be interpreted in the context of a day when artificial lighting was of poor quality and expensive, and the absence of electricity ruled out artificial means of circulating air. These forces were compounded with remarkable overcrowding of structures, the absence of running water, and the primitive state of sewer systems and toilet facilities (these were few and filthy, and often in the yard where they were used by passers-by as well as residents).

One can argue, as did numerous 19th- and early 20th-century experts, that, in the absence of the 25-by-100 lot-size restriction, New York's housing problems would have been greatly diminished (e.g., Potter 1878a, Olmstead 1876). Prior to about 1865, it is likely that the impact of the lot-size restriction was not substantial. However, as development moved relentlessly up Manhattan Island, the constraint prevented modest single-family houses from being constructed in areas where, with smaller lots, it would have been economical to do so. (5)

Further, the rigid lot-size restriction discouraged experimentation with alternative architectures that might have led over time to a market-based improvement of the standard Manhattan tenement house. For example, one 19th-century architect showed that a block built around shallower lots (say, 25-by-50 feet) would have encouraged Philadelphia-style rows of townhomes similar to modern townhomes--more square-shaped structures allowing light and air to enter from both front and rear, so that every room in the house would receive significant relief from the problems plaguing Manhattan's tenements. Such blocks would have housed as many or more people than a block of tenements, while offering far better conditions (Potter 1878b, 1878c; Plunz 1990: chap. 1). If the uniform lot size had not been imposed in 1811 throughout all of Manhattan, it is likely that some developers in the mid-to-late 19th century would have reconfigured lot sizes in various undeveloped parts of the island and allowed subdivision of lots. Alternative, small-scale, profitable strategies for housing the urban poor could then have emerged quite early and been a substantial part of the New York housing environment by 1900. That this did not happen was due in large part to the 1811 mandated uniform lot size of 25-by-100 feet.

Housing and the Rise of "High" Buildings in Manhattan

If lot-size restrictions effectively prevented the building of houses on small lots, what about the alternative of building large multi-unit housing structures on multiple...