Question

How did people in tenements get clothing?

Answer 1

Hint: Tenements are the cramped, old, narrow and usually overcrowded apartment buildings, especially in a poor segment of a large city. They were first built for the purpose of habitat for immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 19th century. The people in tenements depended on the sources that were easily available to them for making clothing.

Complete answer:
It was from scraps or other resources available, people in tenements usually made their clothing.
Since the people who resided in tenements were too poor immigrants and working-class, buying good clothing was so expensive for them and affordable clothes were not ownable for them. They used scrap material, potato or flour sack, rags for making their own garments.
At the same time, several tenement houses served as both homes and as garment factories. These garments which the people in tenements stitched were for the upper classes of the US.
Because of the poorly ventilated, dilapidated and conditions of tenements and intolerable life led by people in these poor buildings, laws were passed for making improvements in the situation and New York passed such a law for the first time by The Tenement House Act of 1867.
More than 80,000 tenements had been built in New York City by the 1900s which occupied a population of 2.3 million people.

Note: It was the 1901 Tenement House Act, which effectively stopped the construction of new tenements on 25-foot lots and mandated improvement in sanitary conditions, building fire escapes and better ventilation in the tenement housings. Many tenements in Chicago got demolished and replaced with large, privately subsidized housing buildings by the 1920s.