Living Conditions
PROBLEMS OF CITIES
The Industrial Revolution resulted in numerous people, including farmers, converging on "industrial cities" in hopes of gaining employment in the factories located there. Due to this greatly increased city population, several serious problems developed in these growing cities, such as homelessness, congestion, and inhuman living conditions.
The homeless problem in the industrial cities was a result of people being unable to find factory jobs, people earning such low factory wages that they could not afford to pay for a place to live, and a lack of enough housing. The homeless wandered the filthy city streets trying to survive from day to day by begging or stealing. Many of these homeless people did not survive their harsh, miserable lives and often died from hunger or disease on the dirty pavement that they called home.
The congestion problem in the cities was caused by too many people living on too small an area of land and also too many buildings occupying this small land area. Factories, warehouses, and railroad yards stood right next to cheap, flimsy houses and apartment buildings, creating very little space for the people to move around in and to carry out their daily lives.
The problem of inhuman living conditions in the cities
was the result of the cities extremely overcrowded population and the lack
of city governments doing anything to improve sanitation or pollution. The
people lived in poorly built tenements, road houses, and cellars. The rooms
in these dwellings were more like "pigsties than human habitations."
These rooms had no ventilation or indoor plumbing. Their floors were covered
with rushes that were rarely changed. Outside these dwellings, pollution
filled the air and waterways of the cities, and rats and insects spread
illness.
The Industrial Revolution caused people to rush to the cities with hopes of finding factory jobs, but this excessive movement into the cities resulted in the serious problems of homelessness, congestion, and terrible living conditions.
Adam