“It was urged that the rear apartments in the proposed new law houses would not be rentable because no tenant who took a rear apartment would stand on a plane of social equality with the tenant who took a front apartment, and that this inequality of social scale would virtually prevent the house being occupied. Tenants would not rent the front apartment of such houses because they would not wish to associate with those who rented the rear. Tenants would not rent the rear apartment because they would thereby put themselves in a position of social inferiority to those who rented the front. It would not seem as if there should be inherently any such objection to rear apartments.”

– Robert DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, The Tenement House Problem: Including the Report of the New York State Tenement House Commission of 1900. 1908.