It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.
Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums: __aximum profits came, not from providing first-class accommodations for those who could well afford them_ but from crowded slum accommodations, for those whose pennies were scarcer than the rich man__ pounds._ Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
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Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums: __aximum profits came, not from providing first-class accommodations for those who could well afford them_ but from crowded slum accommodations, for those whose pennies were scarcer than the rich man__ pounds._ Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.
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