Why did the industrial revolution (american) cause poor housing for the workers?
People go where the jobs are. Factories had work, people moved to the cities. No real public transportation, people lived close to where they worked. As the jobs increased in number, the demand for housing grew in number. Cities were really finite in size, so people were concentrated in the urban areas and housing was at a premium. The growing number of people outpaced the various city’s public works and this lead to sanitation problems, which only exacerbated the problems with the already overcrowded buildings/tenements. The poor housing wasn’t so bad as it was the problem of sanitation, which was a bastion for disease. And that wasn’t so much a failure of the industrial revolution as it was cities not doing a better job at keeping poorer communities’ sanitation issues up to date.
