The return of affordable housing

How living in the past can help us now

This article is adapted from Alan Durning’s new book Unlocking Home: Three Keys to Affordable Communities.

“[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 [light] 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.” -Paul Groth in Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States.

Most Americans live in houses or apartments that they own or rent. But a century ago, less expensive choices were just as common: renting space in families’ homes or living in residential hotels. Working-class rooming houses, with small private bedrooms and shared bathrooms, were particularly numerous, forming the foundation of affordable housing in North American cities.

Misguided laws and regulations almost wiped out these kinds of housing. Now there’s a chance for them to come back, helping those who are young, single, or on the lower rungs of our increasingly unequal society.

In the early decades of the 20th Century, rooming houses offered affordable housing for America’s urban working class. Some had boarding, with a kitchen and dining hall in the basement. In San Francisco a century ago, a passable room might cost 35 cents a night ($8 in today’s currency). Concentrated near downtowns, rooming houses and other forms of 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 slim budgets.

The past century of rising affluence started the decline of the rooming house. 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 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 cheap hotels. In most cases, mental health authorities intended such arrangements to be temporary. Some planned to build and support constellations of small neighborhood-based care facilities, but not-in-my-backyard 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).

Meanwhile, new state and local laws made residential hotels more expensive to operate. Other rules made them illegal outside historic downtowns. As cities expanded outward, rooming houses could not spread to the new neighborhoods.

The rules were not accidents. 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 housing that provided physical safety and hygiene and approximated what middle-class families expected.

This coalition of the self-interested and the well-meaning effectively shut down rooming houses and erected barriers to in-home boarding. Over more than a century, 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 urban housing for those at the bottom of the pay scale.

The rules often imposed middle-class standards that were beyond the means of the working class. In the late 19th Century, California-the West’s trend-setter in housing law-began enforcing a rule ostensibly intended to slow the spread of disease. It dictated a minimum quantity of indoor space per person, on the assumption that living in close quarters is a major determinant of disease.

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 ships. But the rule did not apply to these categories. It applied only in neighborhoods where Chinese immigrants lived. Wearing the mask of public health, the policy raised the cost of housing for Chinese families and pushed them farther from California’s whites.

In 1909, San Francisco banned most cubicle-style hotels, a common form of cheap lodging for itinerant workers and others on tight budgets. The city rationalized the policy as a fire-safety precaution. Had fire safety actually been the goal, the city would have demanded fire escapes, fire-slowing walls at certain intervals, and fire doors.

In the following decade, California began regulating rooming houses and other hotels, setting standards for bathrooms (one per 10 bedrooms), window area per room, floor space per room, and more. Again, some of these rules may have had health benefits. Yet they knocked the cheapest rooms off the market without providing substitutes. Over time, building and health codes demanded ever larger rooms and more bathrooms.They, like codes for other types of housing, also mandated legitimate safety standards such as more exits, better fire-protection features, and rat-proof food storage in kitchens.

Zoning gave city leaders a whole new weapon for separating the laboring class from the “better classes.” After a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1926 recognized states’ power to authorize local land-use planning, city planners quickly trapped residential hotels in the oldest parts of town-the parts built before zoning separated shops, restaurants, and bars from dwellings. And by setting aside vast areas of every city for single-family houses on private lots, they drastically curtailed the land available for all forms of less expensive multi-unit residences.

Over the next three decades, codes and federal lending programs increasingly discriminated against residential hotels by defining a housing unit as necessarily possessing both a private bath and a kitchen. Often, racially discriminatory redlining prevented investment even where zoning didn’t prevent operation.

Mandatory off-street parking rules added insult to injury beginning around mid-century. These land-use rules, which typically required at least one parking space per unit, made multi-unit housing more expensive to build and operate.

In the 1960s, “urban renewal” became the watchword of North American policy on cities. On the ground, it commonly meant leveling residential hotels and the mixed districts that surrounded them, then constructing single-use neighborhoods of one- and two-bedroom apartments. It was housing, but it was too big and expensive for members of the class that had made rooming houses their homes.

The number of cheap rooms for rent is a fraction of what it once was in American cities. In downtown Portland, Ore., the number of units available to rent for the amount that a minimum-wage worker can afford ($458 per month in 2012) fell from 4,500 in 1994 to 3,200 in 2012, according to the Northwest Pilot Project, a housing provider for seniors. These quarters are almost all subsidized and often have long waiting lists.

Publicly supported low-income housing has emerged but nowhere in the quantities needed to fill the gap. The private housing market could do much more to provide living spaces affordably if we discarded those requirements that merely protect others’ property values by outlaw ingrooming houses and other simple housing options.

Historically, the bottom of the scale for inexpensive housing was not the rooming house but the flophouse, a hall of bunks or sleeping slabs. Aside from homeless shelters, North America no longer has flophouses. A century of regulation shut them down. But in Japan they live on in modern form in capsule hotels, which rent enclosed sleeping spaces by the hour or the night. In one $30-a-night Tokyo hotel, the sleeping capsules are stacked in pairs and are just big enough for a single mattress. Yet they each offer air conditioning, a radio and mini TV, a reading light, and a privacy screen. Guests share bathrooms, showers, a lounge, restaurant, and bar.

In most American cities, such 21st-Century flophouses would be illegal on any number of grounds. Habitable rooms may not be smaller than 7 feet by 7 feet in Seattle; sleeping rooms must be bigger still. The hotels do not provide off-street parking for each room, and some do not have enough bathrooms to satisfy codes, which typically require one bathroom per eight units. The “rooms”-the capsules-are code enforcers’ nightmares. Among other things, they lack the windows, fire-safe doors, smoke detectors, and closets required of each legal bedroom. If regulated as dormitories (bunkhouses) rather than as separate bedrooms, they would violate other rules: They lack the requisite unencumbered floor space, for example.

Yet Japan has many such hotels, and its fire-safety record is better than that of the United States. They are cheap, too, at least by Japan’s stratospheric real-estate standards.And capsule hotels operate at a profit without public subsidy.

Imagine a continuum of such choices, extending downward from today’s studio apartments. Along this continuum, we’d have complete studios smaller than those currently permitted, followed by tiny units with private baths but without full kitchens, then updated rooming houses with shared baths and kitchens, then capsule hotels.

One example is the aPodment, a product of Calhoun Properties of Seattle. These buildings are updated rooming houses. Each unit is lightly furnished and has a microwave and a mini-fridge plus a petite bathroom, compactly arranged in 150 to 200 square feet. Off-street parking is minimal and is rented separately, and the buildings have shared kitchens and laundry facilities. In early 2013, rents commonly began around $550 per month, including internet and all utilities. At about $18 per night, aPodments rent for roughly double what San Francisco rooming houses cost a century ago, adjusted for inflation.

In five years, Calhoun and its partners have built more than 400 units at 12 sites on Seattle’s Capitol Hill and in the University District. Occupancy is reportedly near 100 percent because the price is far below that of studio apartments nearby.

Supporters speak for more housing choice for entry-level workers and call opponents elitists or NIMBYs. Opponents fear that “sketchy people” will live in such small units. They also complain about the extra cars they believe will compete for curb parking. In Vancouver, British Columbia, a microloft project has renovated an old SRO into 30 carefully designed studios averaging 250 square feet each and renting for about Canadian $850 (U.S $816) a month, including utilities. In Portland, one new building offers 150 units of about 300 square feet each in the trendy and spendy Pearl District at around $850 a month.

New York is considering reducing its minimum-square-footage rules to allow micro-studios. Similarly, San Francisco recently authorized a trial run of up to 375 new apartments as small as 220 square feet.

Will new mini-studios at $850 per month help people who can afford only half that amount? Actually, they may. In the short run, new units free up older units, which helps free up still older units, and so on down the economic ladder in a process that housing economists call “filtering.” In the long run, new housing turns into used housing. Just as people with less money drive older cars, they also live in older buildings. So new units occupied by baristas and graduate students today may become old units occupied by immigrant dishwashers in a couple of decades. Old-school rooming houses served both upwardly mobile young people and middle-aged working-class singles. The new generation of this housing can, too.

Alan Durning is the founder and executive director of Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based sustainability think tank.

Perspective, Pages 74 on 08/04/2013

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