Substandard Housing Quotes

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.

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 …

But the most horrible spot .... lies....immediately south west of Oxford Road and is known as Little Ireland. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench....must surely have reached the lowest stage of humanity.

All my Dominican friends live in an area called Los Venaga. Their houses are shacks. They'd invite us over to dinner, and we'd sit in plastic chairs on the dirt inside a house.

There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.

I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff.

I grew up in a semi-slum area in Gavipuram, Guttahalli.

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.

Are not the worst examples of architecture to be found in private enterprise in cheap jerry-built homes?

I didn't realise I lived in the ghetto until we moved out.

Save the Children is also working to improve accommodation for refugee families living outside settlements. I met a family which had been living in a substandard building without windows, doors or a toilet.

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

For families to access affordable housing, they often need legal representation that takes their side against abusive landlords.

Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health, not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.

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

My parents both came from working-class backgrounds, my father particularly. He came from a very poor family, 12 of them lived in a little three-bedroom terrace house in Fulham, it was very small with an outside loo and a tin bath on the scullery wall.