Immigrant Housing – Health is a Human Right

Immigrant Housing

Page from a newspaper published circa 1900 of seven black and white photographs showing the housing conditions in Chinatown. The caption reads, "Dens in Chinatown; Subterranean habitations which endanger the health of San Francisco." — Conditions of housing (dens) in Chinatown published in The Wave, ca. 1900
Courtesy of Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

The white community in San Francisco would often categorize the Chinese as disease carriers, condemning Chinatown as a “laboratory of infection,” particularly during the bubonic plague epidemic in 1900.

New immigrants from Eastern Europe often lived in crowded, sub-standard housing as they struggled to find work and assimilate.

Black and white photograph, circa 1903, titled "Buch Alley: showing conditions in unpaved alleys." Two children look out of a window at the camera and three children pose in the middle of the alley, which is unpaved and lined with tenement buildings. Factory chimneys rise in the background. — Buch Alley in Pittsburgh, ca. 1903
Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; Social Museum Collection, 3.2002.41.1