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Keeping the Tenants Down: Height Restrictions and Manhattan's Tenement House System, 1885-1930
By Michael R. Montgomery
Introduction
Between 1850 and 1930, New York City commonly is believed to have offered its poor citizens the worst housing conditions of any of the world's major industrialized cities. Historians emphasize the following features: high population density leading to extreme overcrowding of tenements; tenement houses packed together as closely as possible to maximize land use; the dark, disease-ridden, poorly constructed, fire-prone tenements; the minimal level of utility services offered; and the failure of 19th-century reform efforts. Unfettered capitalism invariably is put forth as the primary cause of all these social ills.
A kind of morality play emerges from this interpretation emphasizing the awful price allegedly imposed on the poor by 19th-century urban capitalism. And, as befits a morality play, a crusading hero— "Big Government"—rises up early in the 20th century to vanquish capitalism's evil excesses. Viewed in this fashion, the tale of Manhattan's tenements is a classic indictment of capitalist institutions and a powerful endorsement of Big Government as the vital counterweight to business's money-grubbing ways.
Because the verdict of "market failure" is so firmly fixed in both the academic and the public mind, it is not surprising that little has been done to reexamine the evidence supporting the idea that New York's 19th- and early 20th-century housing problems are the product of markets, not government. And yet, evidence of "government failure" is not hard to find once it is looked for.
This article focuses on a little-noticed New York building regulation: building height restrictions. Such restrictions began in New York with an 1885 law banning residential buildings higher than 80 feet. They were tinkered with over the next 30 years before being deeply embedded into, and intertwined with, the comprehensive zoning act of 1916 (the nation's first), where they remained in place at least into the 1930s. I argue that these seemingly innocuous regulations had a severe impact retarding progress at the lower end of the New York City housing market. Specifically, they created an environment in which the worst classes of tenements were spared competition that would otherwise have tended to cause their demolition and replacement early in the 20th century.
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