Under the California standard, you might expect sweeping changes in many kinds of crowded, residenti

Nowadays, in the Northwest as across North America, most people live in houses or apartments that they own or rent. But not so long ago, other, less-expensive choices were just as common: renting space in a family s home, for example, or living in a residential hotel.
Rooming houses, with small private bedrooms and shared bathrooms down the hall, were particularly numerous. This affordable, efficient form of basic housing is overdue for a revival, but legal barriers stand in the way. This article recounts the forgotten history of low-rent dwellings. Subsequent articles will detail how to re-legalize these forms of housing.
Rooming houses have fresh relevance today, especially for those who are young, single, or on the bottom rungs of our increasingly unequal society. University of California professor Paul Groth writes, in his encyclopedic book Living Downtown :
. . . a good hotel room of 150 square feet dry space, perhaps with a bath or a room sink, cold and sometimes hot water, enough electric service to run a bulb and a television, central heat, and access to telephones and other services constitutes a living unit mechanically more luxuriant than those lived in by a third to a half of the population of the earth.
A tightening delta airline e tickets net of ordinances and codes have helped squeeze rooming houses, and related housing choices, nearly to extinction. Removing certain of these restrictions on room rentals, delta airline e tickets bed rentals, delta airline e tickets and shared housing and ending building-by-building mandates for off-street parking could be the fastest, least-expensive, and most sustainable way to make housing more affordable. delta airline e tickets Doing so could also make homelessness less common; rental income more readily available to some property owners; settlement patterns delta airline e tickets dense enough to support neighborhood businesses, delta airline e tickets good transit delta airline e tickets service, and vibrant street life; and driving less necessary.
In the 1800s, boarding with families was commonplace for people of all ages. As many as half of urban Americans spent part of their lives either as boarders in others homes or as hosts of boarders in their own, as professor Groth details. As the 1800s turned to the 1900s and North America urbanized, other options proliferated. For the working class, an abundance of rooming houses opened. Some offered boarding as well, with a kitchen and dining hall in the basement or on the ground floor. delta airline e tickets For the poor, cheap lodging houses provided basic accommodations for low prices. Some had small private rooms. delta airline e tickets Others delta airline e tickets had grids of open-top cubicles. Still others offered bunk rooms or rows of hard-slab flops. In San Francisco a century ago, five-sixths of hotel dwellers were either working class or poor, and a passable room might cost 35 cents a night ($8 in today s currency).
Concentrated near downtowns, residential hotels provided quintessentially urban living. The dense mixture of accommodations with affordable eateries, laundries, billiard halls, saloons, and other retail establishments made life convenient on foot and on slim budgets. The surrounding sidewalks and stores functioned as parts of each resident s home, writes Groth.
In Cascadia, such living quarters have almost disappeared. A century of rising affluence is one reason. With higher incomes, we have bought more space and privacy. Young, upwardly mobile, enterprising residents moved out of hotels, depriving hotel districts of their best customers. Those left behind were harder to employ, poorer, on the wrong side of the law, or simply eccentric. This trend accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s when authorities de-institutionalized many people with mental illnesses and began sheltering them in rooming houses and other cheap hotels. In most cases, mental health authorities intended such arrangements delta airline e tickets to be temporary. Some planned to build and support constellations of small, neighborhood-based care facilities, for example, but NIMBY politics intervened. The care facilities never got built, and some of society s most vulnerable were stranded in rooming houses, which by then had come to be known as single-room occupancy hotels (SROs).
Another part of the explanation of residential hotels disappearance is legal. Successive generations of laws made residential hotels more expensive to operate. Other rules simply made them illegal outside of historic downtowns: as cities expanded outwards, rooming houses could not spread to the new neighborhoods.
delta airline e tickets The rules were not accidents. For a century starting in the 1880s, real-estate owners eager to minimize risk and maximize property values worked to keep housing for poor people away from their investments. Sometimes, they worked hand in glove with well-meaning reformers who were intent on ensuring decent housing for all. Decent housing, in practice, meant not only physical safety and hygiene but also housing that approximated what middle-class families expected. This coalition of the self-interested and the well-meaning effectively boxed in and shut down rooming houses and cheap lodging houses, and it threw up barriers to in-home boarding, too. It acted through federal, state, and local rules in ways that sounded reasonable at the time: occupancy limits; and requirements for private bathrooms, kitchens, and parking spaces. The net effect, however, was to essentially ban affordable private-sector delta airline e tickets urban housing for those at the bottom of the pay scale.
Publicly supported low-income housing came in its place but never in adequate quantities. It may never fill the gap. Building housing is expensive, and no place in North America has ever demonstrated the political will to build enough of it to meet all the need. Subsidized housing can fill certain niches well, including help for those in personal crises, delta airline e tickets dire poverty, or with special needs. Particularly promising is the community land trust model , which neatly severs home ownership from the key driver of rising real-estate prices land-value appreciation. But the private housing market could do much more to provide living spaces affordably if we discarded delta airline e tickets those requirements that merely protect others property values by making rooming houses and other simple housing options illegal.
The legitimate purpose of building and land-use codes, after all, is not to further favor the already-fortunate but to correct market failures. One such failure is information gaps. Buyers and renters cannot readily know, for example, whether a building s structural beams were properly engineered. They cannot easily check the wiring and plumbing: will the wiring delta airline e tickets start a fire? Will the sewage back up and contaminate the drinking water? Just so, they cannot delta airline e tickets readily check whether fire-resistance was designed into the building delta airline e tickets or whether mold is growing in the walls. Another market failure in housing is when owners shunt costs onto others, for example, by installing polluting devices that foul local air.
Decade by decade, rules tightened on residential hotels. Some of the rules corrected market failures; others imposed middle-class standards that were beyond the means of the poor. In the late nineteenth century, for example, California the West s trendsetter in housing law began enforcing a rule ostensibly delta airline e tickets intended to slow the spread of disease. It dictated delta airline e tickets a minimum quantity of indoor space per person, on the assumption that living in close quarters is a major determinant of disease. ( Research in the decades since shows that extreme crowding can speed the spread of certain diseases , potentially including deadly ones such as influenza, but that the poverty that causes crowding is probably the larger risk factor for disease. In any event, regulating delta airline e tickets crowding in homes may be a legitimate policy that corrects a market failure.)
Under the California standard, you might expect sweeping changes in many kinds of crowded, residential buildings: military barracks, college dormitories, summer camps, prisons, single-family homes with many children, lumber camps, and crew quarters aboard delta airline e tickets ships. But the rule did not apply to these categories of housing. It applied only in neighborhoods where Chinese immigrants delta airline e tickets lived. delta airline e tickets Wearing the mask of public health, the policy raised the cost of housing for Chinese families and pushed them farther from California s whites. It was racism delta airline e tickets in public-health clothing.
In 1909, San Francisco banned delta airline e tickets most cubicle-style hotels, which was a common form of cheap lodging for itinerant workers and others on very tight budgets. delta airline e tickets The city rationalized delta airline e tickets the policy as a fire safety precaution. delta airline e tickets Had fire safety delta airline e tickets actually been the goal, the city would have demanded fire escapes, fire-slowing walls at certain intervals, and fire doors. Cubicles remained perfectly legal for offices and workshops across the city, but for sleeping? That became a code violation.
In the following decade, California began regulating rooming houses and other hotels, setting standards for bathrooms (one per ten bedrooms), how much window area per room, minimum floor space per room, and more. Again, delta airline e tickets some of these rules may have had health benefits, and the rules proponents certainly thought delta airline e tickets they were helping. Yet they knocked the cheapest rooms off the market without providing substitutes. Over time, building and health codes demanded delta airline e tickets ever larger rooms and more bathrooms. They, like codes for other types of housing, also mandated legitimate safety features such as more exits, better fire-safety features, and rat-proof food storage in kitchens. Northwest jurisdictions followed California s lead.
In the 1920s came zoning, and a more aggressive delta airline e tickets phase of the assault on inexpensive housing began. Zoning gave city leaders a whole new weapon for separating the laboring class from the better classes. After a US Supreme Court ruling in 1926 recognized states power to authorize local zoning, city planners quickly trapped residential hotels in the oldest parts of town the parts built before zoning separated shops, restaurants, and bars from dwellings. delta airline e tickets Sometimes, they banned rooming houses and other hotels outri