The series brought home the horrible conditions in which huge and growing numbers of poor people are compelled to live. For many those conditions are no better than the appalling slums that photographer Jacob Riis made infamous in the 1890s. It is hard to miss the blocks upon blocks of abandoned housing that stand in today's cities - buildings that have been abandoned by their owners because they cannot profitably renovate and rent the spaces. Many of their residents, single-parent families who barely scrape by, now face the additional pressures of welfare reform. And on an even lower social level live a growing population of illegal immigrants who, packed like sardines in tiny apartments, risk deportation if they complain.
Some landlords callously ignore their tenants' needs, sending armed guards to gather rent checks.
Either way , the economics of affordable housing are against them, in good times and in bad. When local economies are booming, developers hope for local decline to make for the kind of bargain-basement property values than can lead to highly lucrative gentrification. When recession hits, unemployment soars and tenant courts are jammed with eviction proceedings. Although the Times did an exemplary job of illustrating the problems, the remedies it proposed in today's lead editorial were lackluster. No, editors of the New York Times should have known better, for they have published editorials and letters to the Editor over the last twenty years that propose a workable reform to make the provision of affordable housing by the private sector viable.