The term “tenement” refers to a building divided into apartments, but has negative connotations due to poor living conditions in the past. Landlords took advantage of immigrants, leading to cramped and unsanitary living conditions. Today, regulations ensure better living conditions, but slums still exist due to various factors.
The term “tenement” simply refers to a building divided into apartments for the use of multiple residents, but has taken on a pejorative meaning, thanks to the history of such buildings around the world. Thus, it is unusual to hear an ordinary apartment building referred to by this term, except in some isolated regions of the world where its negative meaning has not penetrated.
The distinguishing feature of an apartment is that it is a building divided into three or more apartments, and these apartments are rented out by an owner who owns the entire building. Many buildings have large numbers of apartments and multiple floors to house them all.
In the United States, public housing housed most of the new immigrants to the country in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings were cramped, crowded, and poorly constructed. Often, several families lived together in the same apartment to save on rent, leaving minimal space, and the buildings were poorly ventilated. Many also lacked basic water and sanitation, and it was probably extremely unpleasant to live there.
Apartments might be unpleasant, but their landlords were often worse. Landlords would take advantage of new immigrants with price-rigging, intimidation, and other techniques designed to keep tenants from complaining or reporting unsafe conditions. Fires were common, along with the spread of infectious diseases. As a result of these conditions, the term often evokes an image of low-cost, working-class housing for many Americans, and this sense of the word has spread to many other regions of the world.
Particularly infamous were New York City’s public housing projects, and many organizations fought to create protections for residents and legislate at least basic measures of human decency, such as minimum space requirements, mandatory ducts for ventilation, and basic plumbing for sanitation purposes. Today, all construction in the United States is tightly regulated and people would be hard-pressed to find conditions as extreme as those prevalent in the late 1800s, although very poor quality housing still exists.
Many people associate public housing with slums, again thanks to early examples in the United States. In some regions of the world, high-quality housing has devolved, creating slums where pleasant neighborhoods once existed. The increase in slums is being caused by a number of factors including changing fortunes, shifting property values, and increased migration to cities from rural areas.
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