Cheap Boarding Houses Once Ruled America — What Killed Them?

On the night of April 14th, 1865, the plot to murder President Lincoln was planned around a dining table — in a boarding house. And that house wasn't unusual. In the 1800s, boarding houses didn't just exist in America. They ruled it. Up to half of everyone living in an American city either lived in a boarding house or took boarders into their own home. A room, three hot meals a day, for about a dollar fifty a week. No lease. No credit check. No deposit. For millions of young workers, immigrants, traveling salesmen, and runaways, the boarding house was the front door of America. And then America destroyed it. On purpose. In this documentary: the murder house on H Street and Mary Surratt — the first woman ever executed by the U.S. federal government; the widows who built an empire out of spare bedrooms — and how Mary Ellen Pleasant turned boarding rooms into a fortune that bankrolled the Underground Railroad; Mary Randolph's table that produced one of America's great cookbooks; the whole ladder of houses — from the respectable widow's parlor to the waterfront flophouse; the landlady, queen of her domain; the moral panic the reformers called "the lodger evil"; how the Supreme Court called the apartment "a mere parasite" in Euclid v. Ambler (1926); the zoning laws that made America's cheapest housing illegal — including the town that banned more than two unrelated people living under one roof; the fall from four million boarders in 1930 to one in a hundred householders by 2000; the million cheap rooms wiped out of American cities; the Bowery SROs — the last safety net; where the people went when the rooms were gone; and the final twist — the startups now selling the boarding house back to you for $1,500 a month. New documentaries every day — subscribe to Secret State Bureau so you never miss the next forgotten chapter. Like this video and tap the bell for more stories from America's forgotten past. Sources & further reading: - Paul Groth, "Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States" - Wendy Gamber, "The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America" - Albert Benedict Wolfe, "The Lodging House Problem in Boston" (1905) - Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926) - Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, 416 U.S. 1 (1974) - Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (1926); National Housing Act (1934); Housing Act (1949) - U.S. HUD 2023 Point-in-Time Count of homelessness #boardinghouse #housingcrisis #zoning #americanhistory #losthistory #urbanrenewal #redlining #victorianera #1900s #nostalgia #vintageamerica #everydayhistory #homelessness #sro #coliving