Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

More than a billion people in the world live in slums today, roughly one out of every three inhabitants of cities.

It is not squalid people who produce the squalid housing; it is the squalid housing that makes squalid people.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

We need a real tent city in the heart of Moscow.

When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.

It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

I know we haven't cleaned up all the slums, but I didn't create the slums, did I?

Look what we have built ... low-income projects that became worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

In most slums and cities in developing states, population growth is outpacing the ability of the growth in pollution and sewage. Such unmet expectations in over-crowded cities can be the catalyst for civil conflict.

The mobs that held fearful sway in our city during the memorable outbreak of violence in the month of July, 1863, were gathered in the overcrowded and neglected quarters of the city. The closely packed houses where the mobs originated seemed to be literally hives of sickness and vice …. To walk the streets as we walked them, in those hours of conflagration and riot, was like witnessing the day of judgment, with every wicked thing revealed, every sin and sorrow blazingly glared upon, every hidden abomination laid before hell’s expectant fire.... Here disease in its most loathsome form propagates itself.

… many social problems stem from poor housing.

You cannot let men live like pigs …. We need not wait for the Millennium to get rid of the slum. We can do it now.

If this is the second century of slumdom, it is also the 14th year of a self-governed state, when the babies of 1916 are still, as men and women, crying for a happier life for their babies, crying for a simple shelter.

A man of letters never objects to a slum. He sharpens his pen there.

Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops - like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease.

If we provide 400 new beds, we get 400 new tramps.

What a miserable place a city is for poor people.

In size and population Manchester is the second city in the United Kingdom, containing above four-score thousand inhabitants. Imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents ... where you hear from within ... the everlasting din of machinery; and where, when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work instead of to their prayers…. if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment

A third of the city's population of over two million people live under unsatisfactory conditions, many under distressing conditions, some under disgraceful conditions. For thousands home is a mockery. It consists of two or three small rooms of which but one is adequately lighted and often even not that one and none of which is adequately ventilated; rooms that in the hot summer day become an inferno of torture to little children, the sick, and the weak. For the persons living in these homes there is little privacy; there are no reticences; they must share the process of living with other families; they must use a common water closet [toilet]; they must get all the water they use from a common faucet in the public hall; the fire peril menaces them at all times …

...the concentration of human beings in towns...is contrary to nature, and...this abnormal existence is bound to issue in suffering, deterioration, and gradual destruction to the mass of the population...countless thousands of our fellow-men, and still a larger number of children...are starved of air and space and sunshine. ...This view of city life, which is gradually coming home to the heart and understanding and the conscience of our people, is so terrible that it cannot be put away. What is all our wealth and learning and the fine flower of our civilization and our Constitution and our political theories – what are all these but dust and ashes, if the men and women, on whose labour the whole social fabric is maintained, are doomed to live and die in darkness and misery in the recesses of our great cities? We may undertake expeditions on behalf of oppressed tribes and races, we may conduct foreign missions, we may sympathize with the cause of unfortunate nationalities; but it is our own people, surely, who have the first claim upon us...the air must be purified...the sunshine must be allowed to stream in, the water and the food must be kept pure and unadulterated, the streets light and clean...the measure of your success in bringing these things to pass will be the measure of the arresting of the terrible powers of race degeneration which is going on in the countless sunless streets.

There is sometimes a tendency to assume that everyone in this great country has adequate housing. But when you go to certain places, certain neighborhoods, both urban and rural, you find out that's not the case, and I think we have to do much more.

Housing is a social issue: how we live and where we live.

I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn't only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, 'Shoot, eviction does that.'

I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.