La Guardia’s housing zeal traced to his wife’s tenement death

Evidence

The Mayor possessed an intense private interest in public housing. Fiorello La Guardia believed that it had been the dampness and congestion of the tenements in which she had been raised that had given his beloved first wife the tuberculosis that had killed her and their baby; he had vowed to friends that one thing he was going to do “personally” as mayor was to make sure that the city started at last to give poor people in the city a decent, healthy place to live. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 2600