Does this seem like a healthy place to live? Why or why not? (List) Why did families live under conditions such as these?

Expanding Cities

Background: Daily Life Did you know?...As working class families moved from the countryside to urban slums, they had to make many difficult adjustments. One change, for example, was that they could no longer grow fruits and vegetables in their own gardens. Instead, they had to buy their food at markets, where groceries were often rotten, stale, or tainted. Unscrupulous grocers were known to take advantage of the situation. Some milk sellers put formaldehyde in their milk to prevent spoilage. Sugar sometimes contained pounded rice, and dirt was added to cocoa. Source: Ellis, Elisabeth G., and Anthony Esler. World History: Connections to Today. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Print.

Excerpt from Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) You went down one step even from the foul area into the cellar in which a family of human beings lived. It was very dark inside. The window- panes many of them were broken and stuffed with rags….the smell was so fetid as almost to knock the two men down….they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up.

“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill- smelling dye....” — Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“... A place more destitute of all interesting objects than Manchester, it is not easy to conceive. In size and population it is the second city in the kingdom, containing above fourscore thousand [80,000] inhabitants. Imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents, without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness; where you hear from within, as you pass along, the everlasting din of machinery; and where when the bell rings it is to call wretches to their work instead of their prayers,... ” — Robert J.Southey, Letters from England, 1807

Does this seem like a healthy place to live? Why or why not? (List) Why did families live under conditions such as these?