Jacob Riss was born into a middle-class Danish family in 1849. His father Neil Edward Riss taught at the Village School in Ribe. At a young age Riss was taught the value of education and was compelled to learn English. He immigrated to America when he was 20 years old . For the next few years, Riss had numerous occupations in the United States ranging from manual laborer to a book salesperson. By 1873, Riss managed to become a reporter for the New York Associated News. While working as a reporter, he came to know about the terrible inequalities between New York's Upper East Side and Lower East Side, which led to terrible overcrowding and terrible living conditions in tenement houses. The immigrants were paying very high rent for these tenenments to the tenants, real-estate agents and boarding house keepers. Immigrants had no safety net and social services were almost non-existent in the slums. In "How The Other Half Lives", Jacob Riis tried to expose and clarify the living conditions of New York's poor to its wealthy. "The other half" that Riis refers to is the city's poor population whose lifestyle was largely unknown to New York's Prestigious because they simply did not care to know. Riis attempts to effectively analyze the status of New York City's tenements and tenants in the late nineteenth century, which had grown to be largely problematic. In Riis's view, the gathering of the poor in these undesirable living conditions transformed the tenements into nurseries of crime.
Riis begins his analysis by describing the manner in which these tenements grew from housing the city's proud aristocrats to becoming the overcrowded homes for the industrious poor. Firstly, immigration can be cited as the cause for multiplying the city's population. The other causes for overcrowding were economic, one being the cheap rent and another being their close proximity to the work places of the lower class.