In San Francisco, New York City and other huge cities hundreds of thousands of people have been evicted from their homes. By 2017 grass roots political movements against gentrification have grown across the U.S. that have agreed on one important principal: the nation, which now treats housing as a commodity to be bought and sold, should instead treat housing as a public right.
The fight for decent housing started in the U.S. in the 1880s when Jacob Riis exposed the horror of people crammed into tenements in his book How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, published by Scribner’s Books in 1890. Riis’s book was the first to have illustrations and halftones photographs of the squalid, overcrowded slum houses as well as calls for reform. How the Other Half Lives was a success and praised by newspapers in many cities all over the country; many of these newspapers called for housing reforms in their cities that Riis had outlined in his book.
Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the N.Y. City Police Board, was a fan of Riis’s book. The two men worked together to establish the Tenement Housing Commission in 1894, to get the eight-hour day with prevailing wages passed, and got passed in 1895 the New York Tenement Act, which outlawed rear tenement houses. Riis’s book inspired people to struggle for more nationwide. Housing reformers then got the New York Tenement House Act of 1901 that specified the amount of…