There was more to the slums than abject poverty. For a large number of immigrants life in the tenements was an improvement over their old lives

See ‘A Slumless America’ Review: Helping the Other Half Live by Howard Husock of AEI. He reviewed the book In “A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing” by Betty Boyd Caroli. Excerpts:

"Like other reformers, including Catherine Bauer and Edith Elmer Wood, Simkhovitch saw slums through the narrow prism of their deplorable physical conditions, such as overcrowding. She overlooked what Tom Buk-Swienty, a biographer of Jacob Riis, a 19th-century reformer, has observed: “There was more to the slums than abject poverty. For a large number of immigrants life in the tenements was an improvement over their old lives. They worked, paid rent, fed their children and had hopes and dreams.”

By 1930, Wald noted the large number of “empties” on the Lower East Side; immigrants had moved up and out to Brooklyn. Simkhovitch and her fellow housing activists viewed slums through what can be called a reformer’s gaze, certain they would not want to live in one—but they overlooked the slums’ dynamism, thanks to shops, churches, synagogues and mutual-aid associations, none of which would be found in the public housing soon known as the projects.

It would have been a lot to ask that Simkhovitch, idealistic and self-sacrificing, predict that immigrant poverty and its housing conditions would be ameliorated with time. Or that the public housing she championed would itself deteriorate so badly that, by 1990, the federal government would label much of it as “severely distressed”—and demolish it for having become a latter-day slum."

"But it would seem a serious oversight for Ms. Caroli not to mention that Simkhovitch’s housing triumph was not an unalloyed improvement. By 1957, even Bauer, arguably more influential in promoting public housing, had changed her mind, labeling it “dreary” and unpopular."