American Cities Were Once Full of Cheap Boarding Houses — So Why Did They Disappear?

Why did cheap boarding houses disappear from American cities, and how did their destruction create the modern housing crisis and homelessness epidemic? In the 1800s, one-third to one-half of urban Americans lived in a boarding house or ran one. For about three dollars a week, you got a private room, two meals, laundry, and a landlady who ran the whole operation. Boarding houses were the dominant form of urban housing in America for over a hundred years. Then zoning laws, FHA mortgage policy, urban renewal, and a Progressive Era moral panic erased them. Nearly one million single room occupancy units were destroyed. The bottom rungs of the housing ladder were sawed off by law. This deep dive traces how cheap urban housing was systematically dismantled in the United States. We meet the forgotten landladies documented by historian Wendy Gamber, one of the first waves of female entrepreneurs in American history. We follow single room occupancy hotels through their 1950 peak, when SROs made up roughly 10 percent of all rental housing in major cities and New York alone had over 200,000 units. Then we watch the destruction unfold in three brutal waves. First, the Progressive Era moral crusade led by figures like Lawrence Veiller that reframed shared urban housing as a social problem and wrote the template for modern American zoning. Second, the 1934 creation of the Federal Housing Administration, which poured over 120 billion dollars into single family suburbs while institutionalizing redlining. Third, the postwar wave of zoning bans and urban renewal demolitions that gutted the SRO stock city by city. New York banned new SRO construction in 1955 and lost roughly 175,000 units. Chicago lost 81 percent of its SRO stock between 1960 and 1980. San Francisco under Justin Herman destroyed around 40,000 residential hotel rooms. Seattle demolished 16,200 downtown SRO units. Minneapolis bulldozed its entire Gateway District in the nation's first federally funded Urban Renewal project. Boston went from 35,000 SRO units in the early 1950s to 9,500 by 1968. Then came the bill. In the 1980s, with the SRO stock gutted, cheap shared housing illegal almost everywhere, Reagan era housing subsidies cut to a tenth of their late 1970s level, and psychiatric hospitals being closed, mass homelessness erupted onto American streets. The homeless population exploded from around 100,000 in 1980 to about 400,000 by the late 1980s. Researchers like Dennis Culhane and the Pew Charitable Trusts point directly at the loss of SRO stock as a central driver. Who won. Who lost. And what cities like Washington State, Philadelphia, and Portland are doing to legalize boarding houses and SROs again. If you have ever wondered why rents are so punishing, why so many people sleep on American sidewalks, or why young workers cannot afford the cities where the jobs are, this is the history that connects the dots. #BoardingHouses #SROHotels #HousingCrisis #Homelessness #UrbanHistory #ZoningLaws #AffordableHousing #UrbanRenewal #AmericanCities #SingleFamilyZoning #FHA #Redlining #TheBowery #ProgressiveEra #SkidRow #RentCrisis #UrbanPlanning #HousingPolicy #Gentrification #AmericanHistory #EconomicHistory #Economy #Finance #RealEstate Sources and further reading - Wendy Gamber, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth Century America - Paul Groth, Living Downtown, The History of Residential Hotels in the US - David Faflik, Boarding Out - Thomas Butler Gunn, The Physiology of New York Boarding Houses, 1857 - Albert Benedict Wolfe, The Lodging House Problem in Boston, 1905 - Christopher Jencks, The Homeless, Harvard University Press - Pew Charitable Trusts, How States and Cities Decimated Americans Lowest Cost Housing Option - Coalition for the Homeless, Why Are So Many People Homeless - Boston Indicators, Small Rooms Big Impact - Supportive Housing Network of New York, History of Supportive Housing - West End Museum, Boarding Houses in the West End - Governing magazine, SRO Housing Nearly Zoned Out of Existence, by Jake Blumgart - Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Housing the Homeless, by Alan Mallach - Institute for Justice, model ROOM Act legislation - Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, The Origins of American Housing Reform - 99 Percent Invisible, The Sunshine Hotel - Standard State Zoning Enabling Act 1926, National Housing Act 1934, Housing Act 1949 - NYC Housing Maintenance Code 1954 and 1955 amendments - Washington State SRO legalization law, 2024