How did reformers respond to the problems of immigrants and the poor in American cities?

In order to address the social problems of American cities, reformers founded charitable organizations to provide necessary food, clothing and other items to poor city-dwellers. More than ninety of these charitable societies were founded in American cities between 1877 and 1892. These organizations attempted to distinguish between the "deserving poor," who were poor through no fault of their own, and the undeserving, who were poor because of laziness, drunkenness, or some other personal fault.

Some Americans were more sympathetic to the poor. Jacob Riis, a Danish-American, studied the living and working conditions of New York City's poor in the 1880s and took many photographs of sweatshops, tenements, and poor neighborhoods. Riis's photographs caused a sensation when they were exhibited, as did his How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890. The book was originally published without the accompanying photographs, because printing techniques did not yet allow for reproduction of photographs. Riis's photographs and text exposed the squalid conditions in which the urban poor lived and worked to an wealthier, educated audience that otherwise had little contact with the "other half" of society, the poor.

Another reformer, Jane Addams, founded the first settlement house, Hull House in Chicago in 1889. Addams and other reformers lived among the working class and recent immigrants in order to gain an understanding of their problems and needs. By 1900, more than one hundred settlement houses, modeled on Addams's efforts at Hull House, had been created in cities across the nation; by 1920, there were more than 400 settlements. The poor did not live in settlement houses. Instead, middle-class women lived among the poor in an effort to study and improve their living conditions. Addams helped to create the profession of social work, which sought to use scientific methods to study the needs of the poor and create solutions for their problems