A tenement is, in most English-speaking areas, a substandard multi-family dwelling in the urban core, usually old and occupied by the poor.

Originally the term tenement referred to tenancy and therefore to any rented accommodation. The New York State legislature defined it in the Tenement House Act of 1867 in terms of rental occupancy by multiple households, as

Any house, building, or portion thereof, which is rented, leased, let, or hired out to be occupied or is occupied, as the home or residence of more than three families living independently of one another and doing their own cooking upon the premises, or by more than two families upon a floor, so living and cooking and having a common right in the halls, stairways, yards, water-closets, or privies, or some of them.

In Scotland, it continues to be the most common word for a multiple-occupancy building, but elsewhere it is used as a pejorative in contrast to apartment building or block of flats. Tenement houses were either adapted or built for the working class as cities industrialized, and came to be contrasted with middle-class apartment houses, which started to become fashionable later in the 19th century. Late 19th-century social reformers in the U.S. were hostile to both tenements—for fostering immorality in the young and disease—and apartment houses—for fostering "sexual immorality, sloth, and divorce."

George Waring (20 February 1925 – 15 February 2010) was a British television actor from 1962 to 2000. He also had occasional feature film credits. He was best known for appearing on Coronation Street as Arnold Swain, the bigamist husband of Emily Bishop in 1980.

He attended Ducie High School, Manchester and joined the Royal Air Force at the age of 18. After acting with a service repertory company in Europe he had various jobs, worked in repertory theatres in England and appeared in West End plays including Alfie.

Jacob August Riis (May 3, 1849 – May 26, 1914) was a Danish American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist and social documentary photographer. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most famous proponents of the newly practicable casual photography, he is considered one of the fathers of photography due to his discovery of the use of flash in photography. While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the bad living conditions of poor people by exposing their traditionalism to middle class ridicule.

Jacob Riis was the third of the 13 children (one of whom, an orphaned niece, was fostered) of Niels Edward Riis, a schoolteacher and occasional writer for the local Ribe newspaper, and Carolina Riis (née Bendsine Lundholme), a homemaker. Among the 13, only Jacob, one sister and the foster sister survived into the twentieth century. Riis was influenced by his father, whose school Riis delighted in disrupting, and who persuaded him to read (and improve his English via) Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper.