Comments - Latest Popular Stories, Instablogs Community by Abdullah

Nick

Nick — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Nice ...now ignorant tourists can go witness the plight and suffering of the people in those areas and gawk at them while exoticism them. Honestly anyone idiotic enough to think that seeing the slums would be a pleasant trip deserves what they get. To be bitterly honest, you really haven’t seen a ghetto until you’ve travelled to Asia - and I say this as someone who’s ancestry lies there.

Abdullah Khan

Abdullah Khan — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever visited a slum? There may be poverty, but the human spirit is supreme here.

Domonique

Domonique — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The poorest people in North America are still better off than the poorest in other parts of the world, especially Asia and Africa.

To make light of their living conditions is just asinine, if you really want to humble yourself why not try living one day there - without proper water, electricity and commodes.

Abdullah Khan

Abdullah Khan — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Mr Domonique. Pls read the following article

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/10/news/Riis.php

In remembrance of New York past

By Sam Robert

NEW YORK: ’The most pitiful victim of city life is not the slum child who dies, but the slum child who lives,” Jacob Riis wrote a century ago. ”Every time a child dies, the nation loses a prospective citizen, but in every slum child who lives the nation has a probable consumptive and possible criminal.”

Riis’s photographs of slum life were primitive, but they seared New York’s conscience. Many of the worst slums were razed. Stricter safety and health standards were imposed. But slum clearance, by itself, also reduced the supply of affordable housing. And raising standards meant higher rents. So 70 years ago, New York City initiated another alternative: the first U.S. public housing program. First Houses opened on the Lower East Side in 1935.

Now, a collection of 35,000 to 40,000 before-and-after photos, taken mostly by staff photographers for the New York City Housing Authority and recently discovered in a city warehouse, chronicles the grim living conditions in the slums, the destruction of their tenements and the birth of the public housing developments that replaced them.

”It’s an image of the city we never thought we had,” said Dr. Richard Lieberman, director of the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. The archive, which is the repository for Housing Authority records, has organized the photos and made them available on its Web site, www.LaGuardiaWagnerArchive.lagcc.cuny.edu.

”The first thing you walk away with is, what was the definition of slums,” Lieberman said. ”Wow, that was a slum? That, for me was the first startling thing. Those definitions are subject to time and place. People would spend a lot of money today trying to recreate some of those furnishings. And it’s the documentation of what gets cleared away in addition to the structures: family life, interiors.”

Over the years, the demand for public housing typically exceeded the supply, and some of ”the projects,” as they came to be called, deteriorated into forbidding, high-rise slums. Still, for millions of working-poor New Yorkers, public housing provided a haven from the dark, dank firetraps where they would otherwise have found themselves.

Many of the photos are mundane, taken not for artistic purpose but purely for documentation. They were, in effect, the next chapter in the city’s decision in 1901 to photograph every tenement in Manhattan as evidence against landlords whose buildings were considered substandard.

Bob Shamis, the curator of photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, describes the archive as ”workmanlike.” He likens some of the photographs to Riis’s, which, he says, were also more important for their content than for their quality.

Unlike Europe, the United States had no history of public housing, but Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia established the Housing Authority. At the heart of the authority ”beat the spirit of the settlement house and its ethos of social uplift,” Thomas Kessner, a City University historian, wrote in his biography of LaGuardia.

The mayor harnessed New Deal dollars to build model apartments on the Lower East Side, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and in other neighborhoods.

”The housing program, like so many others, developed backwards out of a search for places to spend money,” Kessner wrote. ”The goal was jobs, not houses.”

The collection of photographs ”constitutes one of the largest assemblages of interior views of how average New Yorkers lived in the 1930s and 1940s,” Joel Schwartz, a history professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, writes in an introduction to the online archive. ”They reveal some of the most decrepit and forlorn images of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, along with glimpses of what appears to be decent, viable housing and neighborhoods that also met the fate of the wrecking ball - sacrificed for the broad-brush clearance that made low-income housing possible.”

Ali

Ali — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I saw many of these slums and people living in extreme poverty when I went to India. I was shocked after having been to other developing nations like China and Thailand. I guess I thought that the average standard of living was equitable to these other countries which it is often compared but it is not. Don’t get me wrong there is many wealthy parts of India but the income disparity is huge. It is alarming how few areas have trash collection and access to clean water.

Abdullah Khan

Abdullah Khan — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Mr Ali

Undoubtedly, the difference between rich and poor is growing in india at alarming rate.

Ian

Ian — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

right, now someone make a movie about showing the realities of all developing countries and we’ll be set.

india is full of poverty, and pollution, and sadness.

add a storyline and start making a movie about morocco now or something.

Abdullah Khan

Abdullah Khan — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Mr Ian

I don’t know why you foreigners misunderstand our slums, povert etc? You either see it through what your own slums are like or u r ignorant.The Slumdog Millionaire selectively showed the negativities of a slum life alone.