The settlement houses that were established in poor urban areas were designed to

The settlement houses that were established in poor urban areas were designed to provide safe residences, support services including education, healthcare, childcare, and employment resources by providing creative, innovative programs and by advocating for related public policy reforms.

Explanation:

They were organizations, neighborhoods in major cities such as New York, Boston, and Chicago in poverty-stricken to improve social conditions for underprivileged, underserved people and European immigrants communities in which volunteer middle-class "settlement workers" would live, hoping to share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income neighbours.

The settlement house movement arose in England in the late 1800s and as an attempt to make American society more just and fair they emerged in the U.S. in 1886 with the founding of University Settlement House in New York City Stanton Coit, who lived at Toynbee Hall for several months, opened the first American settlement in Neighborhood Guild on the Lower East Side of New York.  

The settlement idea spread rapidly in the United States by 1897 there were seventy-four settlements, in 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr launched Hull House in Chicago; in the early 1900s there were over a hundred The ''settlement workers,'' usually young middle class women, moved into poor, immigrant areas of major cities, and by 1910 there were more than four hundred in operation.

answer; disconfirm the catharsis theory;

a)apline.     glad to ! : )