Slums offered low rents and integration that relocation would destroy.

Evidence

The textbooks didn’t speak of “advantages” in talking about slums, but, the more perceptive of these women realized, the Manhattantown “slum” had advantages. There were no playgrounds in it, of course, but there was Central Park. “Most families,” the club’s report would conclude, “seemed to be well satisfied with the neighborhood facilities-with the good bus and subway transportation, the good shopping facilities and nearness to the heart of the city.” It was a racially integrated area-a fact very important to the Negro families, not only because they wanted their children to grow up with white children but because they knew, as the City Club was to report, that “services such as garbage and snow removal, schools and shopping were far better in nonsegregated areas.” And the area didn’t have some of the disadvantages associated with slums. Drugs, for example, were already a scourge in slums like Harlem; the junkie was a rarity here. The buildings in which they lived might be dilapidated and overcrowded, but they were palaces compared to buildings in Harlem. Most important-to the families who lived here and were trying to bring up their children “decently”-rents were low, low enough so that they could do so. Three-quarters of the 400 families interviewed were paying less than 50 per month. The average rent per room was 10 per month. In other areas of the city-including most slum areas-rents were much higher, so high that low-income families had to skimp on clothes and food for their children in order to pay them. The more perceptive of the women learned that, while the people who lived in the Manhattantown area did not have much in life, what they did have their neighborhood gave them, And they learned about the helplessness of the poor in the city, a helplessness so much greater than even the helplessness of the lower-middle-class people of East Tremont. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 4001

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Hippies stayed because rents were cheap and the area felt unclaimed — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 1069

Broader Connections

• Hippies stayed because rents were cheap and the area felt unclaimed #corroborates (0.75) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1069