The Tenement Trap: Why Seattle’s Working Men Should Be Grateful
A local editorial contrasts the comfortable cottages of early Seattle with the squalid overcrowding of New York City's tenements, urging citizens to value their land and labor.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
MORE FORTUNATE THAN THEY.
The working man who can enjoy the comforts of his own house, built with his own labor and savings, as is the case with so large a number in our pleasant city of Seattle, can scarcely realize how fearful a thing it would be to live in one of those tenement houses in New York City. A New York paper before us states that there are twenty-four thousand of those tenement houses in that city, which it says are the homes of the working classes of New York, and in its description of them it presents a picture of discomfort and distress such as we have seldom read. In such holes every working man, dependent upon his own labor for subsistence, must live; there is scarcely possibility of his being able to do otherwise.
Our own who are engaged in the different branches of industry and production for themselves, or who labor therein for others, and who occupy the comfortable and handsome cottages that are the pride of our growing city, should congratulate themselves that their lot has been cast in this land of plenty. It should be a source of pride to our citizens that there are so many beautiful homes in this adopted place of their residence, that are the individual property of our working men; and it should be the ambition of every working man to own a home of his own, especially where one can be had so cheaply and with so little effort.
It is a source of gratification, furthermore, for such to have an interest in the welfare and prosperity of the city, to take an occasional 'troll' about the suburbs of this town, especially along the bay front, where are observable many fine dwellings springing up almost every quarter, which are the property and are to become the homes of many classes of our citizens. Such improvements furnish indubitable evidence of the confidence of the people in the continuing life of the city, and are happy augury of its future growth and prosperity.
In 1876, Seattle’s housing crisis was one of abundance rather than scarcity; the editorial celebrates the ease with which laborers could achieve homeownership. This stands in stark contrast to today’s Seattle, where the same demographic faces a severe affordability crisis, making the 19th-century ideal of 'cheap' and 'easy' home ownership for workers a historical curiosity rather than a current reality.
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