As business increased, and the city grew with rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their
wealthier neighbors, and the stamp was set upon the old
houses, suddenly become valuable, which the best thought
and effort of a later age have vainly struggled to efface.
Their "large rooms were partitioned into several smaller
ones, without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent
being lower in proportion to space or height from the
street; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret
with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in
morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as
beggary itself." It was thus the dark bedroom, prolific of
untold depravities, came into the world.
- Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890
Which development most likely contributed to the conditions described by
Riis?
A. Mechanization shifted urban employment to largely unskilled
labor, and new immigrants provided a ready pool of low-wage
workers.
B. The Homestead Act encouraged people to start farms in the West,
and new immigrants fleeing hardship craved their own land.
C. Railroads connected cities and markets from coast to coast,
making it easier for new immigrants to migrate between shifting
employment opportunities.
D. Urban factory workers demanded immigration restrictions to
protect their jobs from new immigrants willing to work for lower wages