How do you explain the problems associated with American cities of the late Nineteenth Century?

How do you explain the problems associated with American cities of the late Nineteenth Century? How did Progressives like Jane Addams and Upton Sinclair respond to the problems and offer different solutions to the urban problems? How did Jane Addams argue for the Settlement House movement and why? What was the intention of Upton Sinclair in writing to the President? To what extend was he persuasive? How did reporter and social reformer Jacob A. Riis describe the tenements of New York in his book, How the Other Half Lives? What was the objective of Riis in writing How the Other Half Lives? Sources: Jane Addams, “The Subjective Value of a Social Settlement,” in Philanthropy and Social Progress: Seven Essays, Delivered Before the School of Applied Ethics at Plymouth, Massachusetts During the Session of 1892 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & co., 1893); 1-26.