Where then must the migrants go?  They are not wanted by the whites and are treated with contempt by the native blacks of the northern cities, who consider their brethren from the South too criminal and too vicious to be tolerated.  In the average progressive city there has heretofore been a certain increase in the number of houses through natural growth, but owing to the high cost of materials, high wages, increasing taxation and the inclination to invest money in enterprises growing out of the war, fewer houses are now being built, although Negroes are pouring into these centers as a steady stream.  The usual Negro quarters in northern centers of this sort have been filled up and the overflow of the black population scattered throughout the city among white people.  Old warehouses, store rooms, churches, railroad cars and tents have been used to meet these demands.

A large per cent of these Negroes are located in rooming houses or tenements for several families.  The majority of them cannot find individual rooms.  Many are crowded into the same room, therefore, and too many into the same bed.  Sometimes as many as four and five sleep in one bed, and that may be placed in the basement, dining-room or kitchen where there is neither adequate light nor air.  In some cases men who work during the night sleep by day in beds used by others during the night.  Some of their houses have no water inside and have toilets on the outside without sewerage connections.  The cooking is often done by coal or wood stoves or kerosene lamps.  Yet the rent runs high although the houses are generally out of repair and in some cases have been condemned by the municipality.  The unsanitary conditions in which many of the blacks are compelled to live are in violation of municipal ordinances.

Furthermore, because of the indiscriminate employment by labor agents and the dearth of labor requiring the acceptance of almost all sorts of men, some disorderly and worthless Negroes have been brought into the North.  On the whole, however, these migrants are not lazy, shiftless and desperate as some predicted that they would be.  They generally attend church, save their money and send a part of their savings regularly to their families.  They do not belong to the class going North in quest of whiskey.  Mr. Abraham Epstein, who has written a valuable pamphlet setting forth his researches in Pittsburgh, states that the migrants of that city do not generally imbibe and most of those who do, take beer only.[12] Out of four hundred and seventy persons to whom he propounded this question, two hundred and ten or forty-four per cent of them were total abstainers.  Seventy per cent of those having families do not drink at all.