The boy showed his strong arms. It is charged against this Italian immigrant that he is dirty, and the charge is true. He lives in the darkest of slums, and pays rent that ought to hire a decent flat.

Spying flames vomiting from a Manhattan tenement one night last week, a scavenging junkman named Roderick Good turned in an alarm. In their beds in the five-story rookery lay more than 100 tenants.

Some crises never seem to change, and in New York, it’s our housing crisis. For those of low income, there simply isn’t enough that’s affordable. We declared a housing emergency after World War II — ...

Alarmingly, hundreds of students live in windowless rooms around the University of Texas. For centuries, convicts and poor immigrants were crowded in windowless rooms in prisons and tenement slums.

What if Marcel Proust, instead of growing up in sophisticated, cosmopolitan Paris, had been the son of immigrant parents who raised him — and themselves — up from the poverty of a New York City ...